Fatal Flaws of The most Correct Book on Earth

Smith obviously had some help with the Book of Mormon from the School Teacher, Oliver Cowdery who was his last scribe and penned the final version of that book and became the second ‘Elder’ in Smith’s church. His first scribe, Martin Harris, who mortgaged his farm to publish the book with the hope of making a lot of money, spent more time at the job but in the end, lost all of the manuscript that he penned covering the first 475 years of history supposedly ‘translated’ from the gold plates of Lehi. Thus proving that Smith’s God wasn’t any smarter than Smith and couldn’t outwit an uneducated farmer’s wife! The LDS ‘Prophets’ following Smith have made no serious attempts to recover the lost 475 years of religious history detailed in the book of Lehi.

It is obviously not a ‘translation’ in the sense the term implies when you do not have to look at the writing you are attempting to ‘translate’. There has been speculation as to just how Smith created this ‘translation’ but all agree it wasn’t by him looking at and trying to read any ancient text.

There is no question that Smith was a charismatic, imaginative fellow with a capacity to convince ordinary people of almost anything. He was known around Palmyra as one who lived by his ‘wits’ and branded as a ‘money digger’ who claimed to be able to find treasures of silver and gold in the ground and used what he called a ‘seer’ stone placed in his hat (that he found while digging a neighbor’s well) in his attempts. His wife and his first scribe claim he dictated to them pages of his ‘translation’ while looking at this same ‘peep’ stone placed in his hat with his face covering the opening.

In the memoirs of his mother Lucy Mack Smith we find the following: Lucy Mack Smith, History of Joseph Smith, p.83

“During our evening conversations, Joseph would occasionally give us some of the most amusing recitals that could be imagined. He would describe the ancient inhabitants of this continent, their dress, mode of traveling, and the animals upon which they rode; their cities, their buildings, with every particular; their mode of warfare; and also their religious worship. This he would do with as much ease, seemingly, as if he had spent his whole life among them.”

This was before the Book of Mormon was written, so it seems Smith was capable with his imagination of creating a story about the aborigines but limited to his own learning and creativity and the ignorance of his listeners.

Smith had a year or more to formulate his ideas about the Book of Mormon story line, from the time he claimed the angel Moroni showed him the hiding place of the gold plates at the hill Cumorah, not far from his home, to his first attempts at dictating text to Martin Harris. Among Smith’s talents could have been the ability of a photographic memory. However that may be, when farmer Martin came back to the Smith house without the manuscript that he needed to show his wife to convince her the book would be worth mortgaging the farm for future royalties, he found his wife was dead set against him being involved with Smith in any scheme. The belief is that she hid the manuscript so well that neither Martin or God could find it.

Lucy’s memoirs tells us the scene when Martin returned without the manuscript: Lucy Mack Smith, History of Joseph Smith, p.128

“At length he told Martin to go back and search again. “No”; said Martin, “it is all in vain; for I have ripped open beds and pillows; and I know it is not there.” “Then must I,” said Joseph, “return with such a tale as this? I dare not do it. And how shall I appear before the Lord? Of what rebuke am I not worthy from the angel of the Most High?”

I besought him not to mourn so, for perhaps the Lord would forgive him, after a short season of humiliation and repentance. But what could I do to comfort him, when he saw all the family in the same situation of mind as himself; for sobs and groans, and the most bitter lamentations filled the house. However, Joseph was more distressed than the rest, as he better understood the consequences of disobedience. And he continued pacing back and forth, meantime weeping and grieving, until about sunset, when, by persuasion, he took a little nourishment.:” [If we can believe the subsequent record, Smith’s God had foreseen this and had already made preparations. See D&C 10]

Smith had about 10 months to find a solution to his new dilemma before his next and final scribe, Oliver Cowdery, arrived on the scene. Oliver lodged at Smith’s parents home while teaching school where he heard of the ‘gold plates’ and maybe the possibility of Smith needing a new scribe.

Smith knew he couldn’t possibly produce another manuscript even close to what had been lost and convinced his God of the futility of trying to do so. The idea that Smith came up with to have another ‘history’ of the same period from someone other than Lehi, the father of Nephi, was a great idea. Lehi was the original leader of the group and whose name was used for the plates and book that was lost. This clever idea of having Nephi write his own record just called for a lot of back tracking for everyone involved including Smith’s God. Nephi dies of old age at about 50 plus years into the lost history with over 400 more years to account for. Smith didn’t give all of the ‘translated’ manuscript to Martin to show his wife and he tells us that he was already into the King Benjamin part of the story at about 124 BC.

This is where things really get tricky. The story is predicated on the timeline of leaving Jerusalem at 600 BC, where Nephi also states that it is during the first year of the reign of King Zedekiah. Modern history tells us Zedekiah didn’t ascend the throne until 596-7 BC, about 3 years later. The Bible tells us that all the sons of Zedekiah were put to death at Riblah on the captivity march to Babylon, but Smith tells us one escaped with his entourage and came to America. (With no details on this) One could believe, reading Smith’s King James Bible of his day, that the year 600 BC for Zedekiah could be a good guess. In 2Kings it shows dates of 600 and 599. The 600BC date is important because an angel tells Nephi that Christ would come exactly 600 years from the time his father left Jerusalem but with Zedekiah already King. Nephites relied on these ‘facts’ to keep their faith strong in Christ’s coming with the King James Biblical dating.

Dating is thus critical to the Book of Mormon, so it would be critical for Smith to know that the Jewish calendar was lunar and the year consisted of 354 days. The 11 day difference from the solar year was corrected every 3 years by the Jews in Jerusalem. The scribes would have to add 30+ days in order for their seasons to come when the calendar said they would. They had Spring planting Festivals where the Festival date needed to come in the Spring. There is no indication that any Book of Mormon writer knew this, including of course, Smith. This would make the dating of Christ’s birth off by 18 years or more. (600 times 11 or 6600 days) But that’s not the issue here. (But, an amazing fact that most people do not know is that the Mayan Indian calendar of that time in Central America was more accurate than our calendars of today!)

We are concerned about how and when Mormon would be able, logically, to have this replacement record availalbe for his abridgment right where Smith needed it with the addition of the small book ‘Words of Mormon’ to explain. (Smith called this replacement record his “small account of the prophets from Jacob“, (WOM 3, Jacob would be Nephi’s younger brother.) and that needed to be in the cave as well with the tons of other plates. Smith and his God get confused about which records are which.

Smith tells us in the preface of the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon that the lost manuscript contained an abridgment by Mormon of the book of Lehi from the plates of Lehi. “I would inform you that I translated, by the gift and power of God, and caused to be written, one hundred and sixteen pages, the which I took from the Book of Lehi, which was an accountabridged from the plates of Lehi, by the hand of Mormon.” The confusion is compounded in a ‘revelation’ claimed by Smith in his Doctrine & Covenants, Sec. 10:44 where God tells Smith that “Behold, they have only got a part, or an abridgment of the account of Nephi” Why would a smart God call it an ‘account of Nephi’ when Smith in his preface calls it the Book of Lehi from the plates of Lehi?

The confusion goes further when Mormon tries to explain what is going on in his Aladdin cave. Mormon 4:23 tells us Mormon went 900 miles all the way back through the jungles from Nicaragua (Desolation) to Columbia so he could get the ‘many wagon loads’ of gold plates, without any indication from God that God wanted him to do it in order to make a 1% abridgment of all the records. These records at hill Shim needed to include a record never before spoken of that needed no abridgment by Mormon.

There was no forewarning by God to Mormon what the purpose was for Mormon to bring these tons of Gold Plates to Cumorah in the last possible minute, other than to load the Nephites down with tons of gold plates that wouldn’t allow them to escape from the savage Lamanites who would kill them and keep the gold. Mormon 5:7 “And it came to pass that we did again take flight, and those whose flight was swifter than the Lamanites did escape, and those whose flight did not exceed the Lamanites’ were swept down and destroyed.”

The other story is that God is smart and he put fools gold in the cave at hill Shim along with the true gold plates and the slowest and most wicked of the Nephites were given this fools gold in their knapsacks and when the savage Lamanites caught and killed them, they started fighting among themselves for the fools gold and stopped pursuing the Nephites so they could get the sacred records safely to hill Cumorah. Ha! You see what faith promoting stories can be concocted! (I went to SLC my last year as a Mormon teacher in Sunday School, (and as a former returned missionary) to pay a visit to the then LDS President Spencer Kimball. I saw a book in the waiting room called ‘Faith Promoting Fiction’ it seems Mormons can make up all kinds of fancy tales, especially in LDS Testimony Meetings, of stories that reinforce the Mormon faith, and that’s OK.)

It is easy to digress in this tangled web of smoke and mirrors. But if we get back in our Aladdin cave at Cumorah with Smith as the story teller, he knows he has the rough drafts of his histories completed, including Mormon’s chapter 6&7 describing the final battle. At this point Smith doesn’t realize that he gave Mormon no commandment or time to review and abridge thousands of Nephite records except in the abridgment itself. And the abridgment couldn’t be made until Mormon found a major gold mine, had the time and motivation to make many gold plates that he tells us about making, more than half way through the abridgment! (3Nephi 5:11)

Smith thinks he just needs to finesse a new first 475 years and get back to his retained King Benjamin manuscript. Smith has General Mormon of the Nephite army, from the time he was a teenager, so busy with battles that he keeps the Holy Ghost waiting at hill Shim an extra 10 years for Mormon to pick up the plates of Nephi and engrave his observations with reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics that he taught himself. We have to presume Ammaron left him an empty gold plate or two to do so.

It was not anticipated that he wouldn’t start those ‘observations’ or ‘abridgment’ until after the last great battle when he was all alone in his Aladdin cave with plenty of time. (For those who don’t believe that God could make Mormon an Aladdin like cave will have a hard time believing any of this!) If Mormon God had looked in his Seer Stone he would have known this, and didn’t have to risk losing the whole history on the plates of Nephi by Mormon carrying them into battle over thousands of miles for 40 years! (Mormons are taught that if they go to the ‘Mormon Kingdom’ in heaven, each will be assigned their own (3G iphone5) or ‘Seer Stone’.) Mormon could have picked them up with the other plates 35 years later as described in Mormon 4:23.

Based on what Smith said in the preface to the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon, Mormon should be telling us of a commandment to abridge the complete Nephite history of tons of records. (Otherwise, what was the point of bringing them 5,000 miles from Medellin, Columbia?) He might have followed Ammaron’s advice and recorded what he observed during his lifetime. (Mormon 1:4) But we find in 3Nephi 5:16-17 that he made the abridgment first, with plates he made with his own hands! “16 Therefore I do make my record from the accounts which have been given by those who were before me, until the commencement of my day; 17 And then I do make a record of the things which I have seen with mine own eyes.” He tells us in vs. 11 “And behold, I do make the record on plates which I have made with mine own hands.”

Smith has Mormon start his record after 4Nephi, according to vs. 17, above. Mormon 1:1 “And now I, Mormon, make a record of the things which I have both seen and heard, and call it the Book of Mormon.” The fatal mistake of Smith was not having Mormon get a revelation from God telling him that his great mission in life was not to just make a book about ‘the things which I have both seen and heard‘, but to make a 1% abridgment of the 1,000 year history! Obviously there was no rush. Smith could let Mormon live as long as he wanted. He let Amaleki and Ammaron live to be about 300 years!

But what Smith can’t do, if he wants to gain credibility, is not give a command for Mormon to find and retrieve the Nephite records for the specific purpose of abridging that record, and this needs to be part of what Mormon ‘heard‘ from God! Smith can still have Mormon record it as what he has ‘seen and heard’ 40 years later, but it must be included for Mormon to have had the motivation to find a gold mine, etc, etc.

There would be no point and it would be too risky for Mormon to take the plates of Nephi from their safety at hill Shim with the sacred history on it if Mormon had no command or time to abridge it before the last battle at Cumorah 50 years later! Smith missed his best opportunity when he had Mormon quit the army for 12 years with nothing to do. (Mormon 3:11) That would have been the ideal time, for Smith to have God give him a revelation for his son not to be a missionary somewhere, (Moroni 8:1) but to help him retrieve all the records and have Moroni mine for gold in Nicaragua while Mormon studies the records and makes his abridgment. God could tell him that he didn’t have to go back the 900 miles to Columbia because God knew just which records he wanted abridged and could easily whisk them to Mormon’s doorstep either in Nicaragua or Cumorah!

But no, Smith has another less credible story of Mormon engraving his own life story after abridging the 1,000 year history with plates he made with his own hands. The Words of Mormon contradict all of that. Now, Mormon had to finish chapters 6&7 after the battles where he was wounded. (Moroni just makes up the lie in chapter 8:3, 5, that his father was slain in battle when he hadn’t even begun his abridgment, and needed a few years just to study tons of records, and wait for God to give guidance.)

Based on the 1830 edition, after his son, along with the other survivors, left wounded Mormon alone in the cave, when Mormon was feeling better after the angel brought him food and water, he would have to pick up the plates of Lehi and realize this contained the beginning of the story and start his abridgment called ‘the book of Lehi’. He would often stop and wonder how he had failed as a father to have Moroni leave without even saying goodbye and with only chapters 1-5 on the ‘few plates’ he gave him before the battle. (Mormon 6:6) But, if we can believe what Mormon says in 3Nephi 5:17, then he hasn’t even begun the abridgment from the time of Lehi to Mormon’s day, and his first 5 chapters can’t be on those ‘few plates’.

Smith certainly had Mormon chapters 1-7 and Moroni’s chapters 8 and 9 completed before he dictated his two page book called ‘Words of Mormon’ and had Moroni quote a lot of New Testament stuff to be used for conversion to his shortly to be formed new church. He unwittingly quoted the last verses in KJB Mark’s gospel 16:15 verbatim “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature”, not knowing that later editions of the Bible will delete this and what comes after as not being in the oldest manuscripts. Smith goes on in Mormon 9:24 “And he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned.” Smith and Cowdery had the nerve to copy verbatim from Smith’s KJ Bible and continues with vs. 16: “And these signs shall follow...etc” with another verbatim quote from what modern scholars have discarded as not being the words of Jesus! (Can anyone imagine the implications of finding a word for word version on plates written in Egyptian on the American continent in 400 AD with the writer never having heard of the gospel writer Mark or the words ascribed to him? Wow!)

With full confidence Smith inserts the ‘Words of Mormon’ into his record after he finished dictating his replacement record. In a convoluted ‘true story’, Mormon needed to find the plates of Lehi and start with the book of Lehi that would support what Smith wrote in the preface of the 1830 BOM edition. But here again, Smith and his God are painting a false picture. Smith doesn’t have Moroni show up during Mormon’s time in the cave in order to know that his father didn’t die in battle and was busy with records including the Jaredite record and maybe realize it would be better for a son to help his father than chase after savage Lamanites for 15 years.

But Smith has Mormon, without command, abridge the full Nephite record, and as long as the angel kept bringing food and water along with finished new gold plates ready to engrave, Mormon might as well busy himself doing something. Did Mormon lie when Smith has him say in 3Nephi 5:11 that he made the gold plates that he engraved on with his own hands? Did he do that by Alchemy or by finding a gold mine?

But contrary to what Smith says in his 1830 edition, Mormon in his ‘Words of Mormon’ doesn’t go to the plates of Lehi to start abridging the book of Lehi that Smith tells us is on the manuscript that Martin Harris lost, Mormon, instead goes to the plates of Nephi and abridges them down to the ‘reign of this king Benjamin of whom Amaleki spake.‘ To say the least, this is a very misleading and confusing verse. (WOM 3) If we take literally what Mormon/Smith says, he is saying that he just abridged the very record that he now intends to insert in this same record!

To cover his butt, Smith, in his replacement record refers to more than one set of ‘plates of Nephi’, if there is one thing for sure that you can say about the Book of Mormon that Mark Twain hasn’t already said, is it is full of ambiguities. The LDS church maintains that Mormon didn’t abridge the replacement record, but inserted it in the middle of the book of Lehi without abridgment. But here Mormon says just that, that he abridged the record in which Amaleki spake.

The remaining question is; why are we not reading that the record Mormon is referring to in vs 3 that he abridged is the book of Lehi that Smith describes in his 1830 edition? Why does Mormon say that it is the record in which ‘Amaleki spake’ when the only record we know of, that Amaleki spake in, is the one that Mormon is about to insert during his abridgment of the plates of Nephi down to king Benjamin! It is surely a tangled web we weave when we attempt to deceive.

We don’t really have to be concerned about who wrote what and when, as all the tons of records were meaningless. The plates supposedly delivered to Smith were superfluous. Smith did not need to examine anything that was supposed to be written by ancient writers. Smith, along with whoever was inspiring him, just needed to have a plausible story that could be believed by people who lived by emotion or feeling, rather than fact or logic. (There are those who believe that dead Mormon was with Smith in spirit and he was reviewing all that he had written on the plates and was busy writing an English translation on the tiny egg shaped stone that Smith placed in his hat and read from.The spirit wouldn’t let the words disappear until the ‘spirit’ saw that what the scribe wrote was correct.) Good luck with your Mormon belief, High Priest Mitt Romney!

Smith knew that his replacement story would have to be essentially the same with the same events because Martin Harris knew the story line of the book of Lehi. So the events in the desert would have to be essentially the same only now God would have to give any important revelations to Nephi as well as his father or his father would have to give Nephi the details of his visions that Nephi needed to remember for 40 years before being inspired to write it down on different sets of plates. But this isn’t Mormon’s problem in 385 AD. It’s a big credibility problem for the book’s author along with his premise. (It just seems so much easier for God to prevent Lucy Harris from stealing the manuscript her husband brought home.)

It is a tough sell anyway you look at it. Most of the objective scholars who spend anytime trying to make heads or tails out of the book, give it up as a lost cause. Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, and Brigham Young are all on record describing the Aladdin cave at hill Cumorah filled with not only tons of gold plates stacked up everywhere but also including the sword of Laban that someone had to hand down for a thousand years.

Mormon/Smith needs to find a reason why Mormon needed to risk everything to go back 900 miles of mountains and jungle through enemy lines to dig up these tons of records and find some way to transport them without mules, horses or oxen over 5,000 miles. If Mormon had a son leading 10,000 in the Nephite army, why didn’t he get him to help his 70 year old father? He had to do this when he knew that his God could just whisk them to anyplace in the world he wanted them, just by exercising faith as God did when he removed them back from hill Cumorah to hill Shim in Columbia. (Smith has a whole mountain moved (Mt Zerin Ether 12:30) in his Jaredite history.) Or, move them an extra 50 ft deeper in the earth at Cumorah in order to keep them safe. Don’t laugh, Smith tells us in his book how god can make money and metal objects ‘slippery’. When they are buried, God or the Devil can slide them through the earth wherever they desire. (Mormon 1:18, Helaman 13:33-37)

Smith loved to improvise and it passed for ‘inspiration’ for a lot of his followers. But when it is written down, you are stuck with the consequence of your written words. By writing that Mormon returns from Nicaragua through 900 miles of mountain jungles of enemy lines and back again to collect tons of sacred Nephite records with no mode of transportation for them, makes Mormon/God look stupid, if these records would not be used for some useful purpose!

Mormon supposedly took the plates of Nephi from this hill 40 years earlier and was supposed to write his observations on them. If he is now to abridge this record, he has to find time to study it and find time and a place to mine ore and make it into plates after he was directed by God to do so. In Mormon 3:16 he tells us he has quit the army and has become: “…I did stand as an idle witness to the things which I saw and heard…” If we can believe the story, Moroni, Mormon’s son is a leader of ten thousand in the Nephite army that his dad just quit as commander because of their wickedness.

Moroni is later to become and ‘angel’, so if his father quit because of the wicked army, what about Moroni? If he and his father were the only righteous ones, why didn’t they work together picking up the tons of records from hill Shim during the 10 years of idleness that Mormon describes? Certainly Moroni could help mine for gold so that his father could use his time to study the records and then use the ore and still be able say he made the plates with his own hands?

Mormon uses the next 5 verses to preach to the gentiles and the tribes of Israel that he seems sure will read his remarks. Chapter 4 is devoted t0 his 10-12 years of’ ‘idle witnessing’ of the fights between two wicked groups of Jews with his son leading ten thousand of them. During this time he writes about 30 verses of preaching and observations of wickedness and battles. (But of course he could have written nothing until after the battle at Cumorah.)

This 12 years as an ‘idle witness’ would have been a great time for Mormon to study and abridge the plates of Nephi that he has successfully kept from being stolen from his army tent by his wicked followers. He could have written about any revelation telling him to do so. God could have told him that he needed what was still in hill Shim before starting this monumental effort. Had this ‘storyteller’ or ‘God’ known in advance, the year before Mormon quit because of extreme wickedness, Mormon and his son could have picked up the rest of the plates at hill Shim more easily when the Lamanites returned to their own lands as described in Mormon 3:7. Mormon/God still risks losing the records along with lives, by loading Nephites down with these tons of records. (Mormon 5:7 “…and those whose flight did not exceed the Lamanites’ were swept down and destroyed.”

Smith tries to have it both ways in his tangled web. He invents an only son of Mormon named Moroni, someone who will be almost more famous than anyone connected to Mormonism. He turns this character into one of his biggest liars by first having him lie about how his father died and what his own life consisted of. Mormon introduces us to his son Moroni in Mormon 6:6 in 385 AD by telling us he gave his son a ‘few plates’ before the big battle. What exactly they were and for what purpose, will never be known!

Mormon continues by describing the battle and how he was wounded in vs. 10, and in vs. 11, and tells us that only 24 Nephites were left living, including his son Moroni. And in vs. 12 talks of the ten thousand of the army, led by his son Moroni, and are now all dead and gone to hell. He continues the description that he would have had to engrave on the plates of Nephi after the last battle in the Aladdin cave when both the Lamanites and the surviving Nephites along with his son had departed.

This is all Smith/Mormon had written about Moroni before the loss of the book of Lehi manuscript. Things were always in a creative state of flux in the head of Smith. At one point, early on, Smith’s brother is on record that the angel who first appeared to his brother Joseph, was named Nephi, not Moroni. Be that as it may, if Moroni is be a major character in Smith’s tangled web, more must be added to the then existing story, hopefully without contradiction.

It would appear that Smith had Moroni’s chapters 8&9 in his father’s book finished before the insertion of the Words of Mormon, after the insertion of the replacement record. The illogical sequences are mind boggling. Let me make the point of the ‘little’ that Mormon says about his son and its significance. Obviously Mormon did not go southward as claimed by Moroni in Mormon 8:2-3 and was not killed as stated. Smith should have fixed this, but he didn’t. He was too interested in getting the next chapter finished that would be the basis of his new church.

But, we see the compounded absurdities when we think of how we reconcile the addition of Moroni’s chapters 7, 8&9 by Smith, that he thought would hopefully give more of a connection between father and son. For one who studies the book, it just creates more absurdities. First, there is no time and place for Mormon to have met a woman to marry as commander of the Nephite army continually moving thousands of miles fighting mostly losing battles. In Mormon 2:16 he tells us in the 345th year he was fighting and had been forced north to the city of Jashon near the hill Shim. He was 10 when he was told by Ammaron to pick up the plates of Nephi at Shim when he was 24. It is now 23 years later and Mormon is maybe 34 instead of 24 and tells us that he sees nothing but wickedness around him. He tells us in vs. 18 and 19 that he finally picked up the plates of Nephi and that he wrote his observations on them and they contained more complete descriptions of the wickedness that abounded. He tells us further that what he is currently writing on is not fuller account he wrote on the plates of Nephi. (After the battle.)

A plausible sequence could be that Mormon could have written his fuller eyewitness account on the plates of Nephi after the book of 4Nephi. If that fuller account contained the command to abridge the complete plates of Nephi including his fuller eyewitness account, he should have included it in his abridgment that he says he he didn’t start until he had finished the complete 1,000 year history. All of this could only have happened at Cumorah where it would have been difficult for Mormon to find enough gold to do the job. Or, of course, in Smith’s head in 1827.

And is this all taking place as flash backs written in the cave at Cumorah? It is unlikely that Mormon would be able to give dates based on the coming of Christ without having studied the plates of Nephi. This is another argument that Mormon wrote nothing until he had the time and tranquility in the Aladdin cave at Cumorah. He could have told us he did this when he quit the army in Nicaragua, but he didn’t. He could have told us God told him to go back and pick up all the records, but he didn’t. He could have told us his son Moroni quit the army that his father no longer commanded and helped him mine for ore, but he didn’t!

In Mormon 2:29 we are told that a treaty was made by Mormon with his enemies when he was about 40 for the Nephites to inherit the lands north, starting at Panama. Mormon is 40, we hear of no wife or son and Mormon is constantly on the move with very wicked people. Now Smith comes up with the bright idea that Mormon has a son who is old enough to have not only heard him speak in a Jewish Synagogue but wrote down all the words in Egyptian of his father’s plagiarism of Paul’s ‘faith, hope and charity’ epistle to the Corinthians in the New Testament. This, Smith inserts as Moroni chapter 7. He does this without checking in his story where this could have conceivably taken place. No one taught Mormon or Moroni to read and write in two complicated languages. In which of the battlefield tents was Moroni conceived and with what woman? Who cared for the infant and young child Moroni? Women didn’t read or write, so who had the time and knew the languages to teach Mormon and/or Moroni?

Chapter 8 starts out by Moroni telling us it is an epistle from his father shortly after Moroni entered the ministry. Now Moroni is suddenly a grown man teaching somewhere where wickedness didn’t abound and they were only concerned about the Catholic teaching of infant baptism. Wow!

First, how did Mormon’s epistle get to Moroni and how did Moroni’s epistle get to the retreating Mormon with his idolatrous, wicked people to tell him of their disputations about infant baptism? Where in north or south America could he have been with his ‘Ministry’ where such things were being discussed? His father is about to quit leading the army because of its wickedness and just observe what was happening. Mormon says that Moroni led ten thousand of these wicked soldiers. Just when did Moroni leave the ministry to lead soldiers that commit awful things? Why didn’t he quit the army when his dad did and help him write the record? When and where did he learn to read and write both Hebrew and Egyptian?

What Smith didn’t think out was, if there was no ‘directive’ from God to make a 1% abridgment of the whole Nephite records except in Mormon’s abridgment itself, then the only conclusion one can come to is that this abridgment was all made after the last battle when Mormon had been deserted by everyone and all his people were dead and he was left alone to die in his Aladdin cave. This vital point is never apparent during the abridgment, especially in 3Nephi when Mormon identifies himself as the abridger and commentator of the record in 3Nephi 5:11-12 on plates that he has made with his own hands. (11 “And behold, I do make the record on plates which I have made with mine own hands”.) If he made them while still in Nicaragua he fails to tell us about his command to do so.

Palmyra is not known for its abundance of gold. Smith has got himself boxed in with Mormon doing the abridgment before any commandment and before he says he is going to do the record of his observations during his life. So Mormon must leave his Aladdin cave and look for gold, mine it, refine it, make it into plates, etc, but first make a pick and shovel while looking for an available vein of gold somewhere. He tells us nothing about these activities or that his son Moroni would have been very helpful if he had not abandoned him. 3Nephi 5:16 “Therefore I do make my record from the accounts which have been given by those who were before me, until the commencement of my day; 17 And then I do make a record of the things which I have seen with mine own eyes.” He tells us in vs. 15 that it is a record from the time of Lehi, and if we can believe Smith, starting with the book of Lehi from the plates of Lehi. “15 Yea, a small record of that which hath taken place from the time that Lehi left Jerusalem, even down until the present time.”

When we examine the written word, it just doesn’t ring true that Mormon all by himself, wounded, 80 years old, scavenging for food and water, finds gold, makes plates, finds engraving tools all before getting any instructions from God as to what God wanted. It certainly sounds like Mormon is continuing his narrative of his life after he finishes 4Nephi, but then what could possibly be on the ‘few plates’ that he supposedly gave his new found son? (Mormon 6:6 “…these few plates which I gave unto my son Moroni.” This is the first time our storyteller Smith allowed 75 year old Mormon to mention that he had a son named Moroni who was a leader of ten thousand in the Nephite army that Mormon commanded.

In Alma 43:16 Mormon writes in his abridgment: “Now, the leader of the Nephites, or the man who had been appointed to be the chief captain over the Nephites —now the chief captain took the command of all the armies of the Nephites—and his name was Moroni; 17 And Moroni took all the command, and the government of their wars. And he was only twenty and five years old when he was appointed chief captain over the armies of the Nephites.” In real life, how can any father of an only son named Moroni not mention this fact when he mentions the name of a former leader of the Nephites with the same name at least 20 more time in just this one chapter!

This would be the first time Mormon saw that anyone had been called Moroni among the Nephites other than his son! In Alma 44 Mormon writes the name Moroni another 13 times. There are 13 more in Alma 46. Five more times in Alma 48 and 9 more in Alma 49. There are 18 in Alma 50 and if that was not enough Mormon read about a City being built with the name Moroni, the very city that his son was named after! And still silence from this cold uncaring father. Alma 51 has another 11 instances of Moroni, the leader of the Nephites being mentioned fighting the Nephites’ enemies. So we can only conclude after mentioning the name 91 times in 5 chapters that the only reason for Mormon not to mention the connection with his son would be that Smith hadn’t yet thought of creating a son for Mormon with the name Moroni! Mormon was now old and in the cave, abandoned by son and the 23 survivors. Was he just too ashamed and bitter to associate his son with such a superb leader, the first Moroni?

Just so the reader knows, the references to this Moroni continue 99 more times until he gives his command to his son Moronihah. A grand total of 190 times. One would think with a son called Moronihah that would trigger a reference to Mormon’s son, but Moronihah references continues for another 16 times with no connection to Mormon’s son Moroni.

Smith or Cowdery concluded after a couple chapters of the book of Moroni that this father-son thing in Mormon chapter 6 was very tenuous. Smith had invented the ‘epistle’ thing for written communication, without knowing the meaning of the word, and created fantasy emails between various leaders, and now, with father and son, in the book of Moroni.

Of course we never hear who the mother was. Mormon tells us Lehi descended from the tribe of Manasseh. (Mormon was supposed to be a pure descendant of Lehi) Lehi’s people were absorbed into the much larger Mulekite group in Zarahemla that were undoubtedly all of the tribe of Judah.

It is certain that a son of the Jewish King Zedekiah was a Jew. All of the people in Zarahemla were Jews until the small group of the Manasseh tribe led by Mosiah merged with this much larger group of Jews, it is likely Mormon married a Jewess. And it was likely that Moroni learned his Hebrew speech (Mormon 9:33) from her and was inspired to do his missionary work in the area of hill Beverly in the land northward where most of the Zedekiah/Jews had migrated. Moroni chapter 8 is unclear whether Moroni is paraphrasing his father’s plagiarism of Apostle Paul’s New Testament teaching. I believe the synagogue thing and the infant baptism in Moroni 9, were all Smith’s imagination at work. It is highly unlikely that Moroni wrote down the Synagogue sermon of his father that he kept in his vest pocket for 40 years. And it is very unlikely that Mormon would be preaching the Apostle Paul’s teaching of the New Testament in a Jewish Synagogue in Central America in 360 AD. He tells us in Mormon 3 that this was a time of extreme wickedness on both sides during his stay in the city called Desolation and he was just an ‘idle witness’.

There are so many ‘red flags’ in this book it is hard to know how to simplify. Mormon, after being chased by the savage Lamanite Indians from Columbia through jungles of present day Panama, Costa Rica and into Nicaragua, tells us in Mormon 4:23 that he was going back to maybe Medellin, Columbia (after having been an observer for 10 to 12 years where he could have started his abridgment if God/Smith had been smart enough to have him retrieve the records earlier) (Even for God, moving the plates 900 miles is easier than 5,000 miles!) so Mormon could retrieve all the records that 300 year old Ammaron hid in hill Shim when he moved them from near the temple in Bountiful to Shim. (One would think this ancient of ancients would find a convenient hill near Bountiful to carry them to, before burying the tons of gold plates.) One would also think that Mormon, if he had a son Moroni, would have taken him to help load and carry these tons of records the 8 or 9 hundred miles from Medellin, Columbia to Nicaragua. But, alas, not a word about Moroni until he appears, 10 yrs later, as leader Moroni of 10,000 soldiers in the wicked Nephite ragtag army.

Immediately after obtaining these tons of records we are told in Mormon 5:7 “And it came to pass that we did again take to flight, and those whose flight was swifter than the Lamanites’ did escape, and those whose flight did not exceed the Lamanites’ were swept down and destroyed”.

So who was inspired to load hundreds of Nephite soldiers down with tons of gold plates if they wouldn’t be able to flee as fast as a Lamanite with only a spear and loin cloth? Come on Smith, you can do better than that when God can have all the tons of records waiting in the Aladdin cave at Cumorah months before you get there with no effort at all on his part.

With Smith’s God no smarter than Smith is, no one told Mormon he didn’t have to go back 900 miles through enemy lines to get anything, God knew in advance what he would need and could select only the records that God wanted abridged. Up to that point neither God nor Smith talked about an abridgment where all the records would be necessary for Mormon to review at Cumorah or in the land of Desolation if the Mormon God wanted Mormon to do something productive during the 12 years of being an ‘idle witness’ writing 30 verses.

More on this later…or check out “Fatal Flaws of the Most Correct Book on Earth” (Book of Mormon) at Amazon.com

A terrorist act is performed by a terrorist for either political or religious reasons, or both. It is done without warning and without concern for the lives of innocent people and/or property. By this definition, the Mormon Christ is a terrorist in 3Nephi, chapters 8&9, he is not the forgiving Bible Christ who on the cross forgave everyone and told the thief being crucified next to him that this thief would be with him (Christ) in Paradise on that very day.

On the other hand, if somehow Jesus was not lying to the thief, we have to ask ourselves if the destruction that the ‘terrorist’ Christ caused on the American continents was somehow an awful punishment of millions of men, women and children, we ask, just how would this false Jesus know who had been naughty or nice in America when he had no knowledge of what went on in America for at least the last 34 years? Would Christ know in 10 BC that a 10 year old living in America then, was already scripted for destruction along with his family at the age of 44, so this terrorist Christ is pre judging and killing him and his family without a warning, to celebrate his crucifixion and the eventual redemption of all people? 3Nephi 8:14-16.

14 And many great and notable cities were sunk, and many were burned, and many were shaken till the buildings thereof had fallen to the earth, and the inhabitants thereof were slain, and the places were left desolate.

15 And there were some cities which remained; but the damage thereof was exceedingly great, and there were many in them who were slain.

16 And there were some who were carried away in the whirlwind; and whither they went no man knoweth, save they know that they were carried away.

The Biblical Jesus story tells us that there was 3 hours of darkness while Jesus hung on the cross from the sixth to the ninth hour. (Noon to 3:00 pm.) This would be between 1 and 3 AM when everyone is sleeping in America. Smith, as always, tries to do the Bible one better and has 3 days of darkness. He even has one of his false prophets prophesy that there would be 3 DAYS of darkness, not as they may have perceived in Jerusalem, but in the Book of Mormon it covered over all the face of the land!

3Nephi 8: 3 “And the people began to look with great earnestness for the sign which had been given by the prophet Samuel, the Lamanite, yea, for the time that there should be darkness for the space of three days over the face of the land.”

The Bible speaks of the ‘darkness’ over the land, whether it was the hemisphere we may never know. Europe or India did not record this anomaly. The Bible tells us of the Temple crack and of earthquakes, etc. after the hours of darkness when Jesus died, but Smith has all of the destruction happen while the inhabitants were waiting for the ‘sign’ of the 3 DAYS of darkness.

We are told in Helaman 12:13-15 the following: 13 Yea, and if he say unto the earth—Move—it is moved.

14 Yea, if he say unto the earth—Thou shalt go back, that it lengthen out the day for many hours—it is done;

15 And thus, according to his word the earth goeth back, and it appeareth unto man that the sun standeth still; yea, and behold, this is so; for surely it is the earth that moveth and not the sun.

Is this Smith preparing the reader for the 3 DAYS of darkness on the North and South American continents? If that would be the case why would there not be any records in Europe or Asia of the 3 days of sun? The Maya were great astronomers and had the most accurate calendar on earth, so why didn’t they record this event? The earth rotates at a little over 1,000 miles an hour. For one thing there would be no wind for those 3 days anywhere! To cause darkness over both the North and South American Continents would be a mindboggling event and for what purpose would God need to do it in America unless it was to increase the suffering from all the destruction he inflicted where no one could see to care for the injured.

Vs 11 “And there was a great and terrible destruction in the land southward.

Did our writer 2000 yrs ago have his TV on to see and describe what was happening 5,000 miles apart? Or is Smith just letting his fantasy run wild?

12 But behold, there was a more great and terrible destruction in the land northward; for behold, the whole face of the land was changed, because of the tempest and the whirlwinds, and the thunderings and the lightnings, and the exceedingly great quaking of the whole earth;

The whole chapter describes the killing and wanton destruction supposedly on an unsuspecting populace in North and South America at the time of the Biblical crucifixion of Christ and the time the Biblical Christ was in Paradise with the thief. The last recorded words of the Bible Christ recorded in Luke 23 were “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” and to the thief “Verily I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” We can only conclude that the Bible Christ kept his word to the thief but the Book of Mormon Christ went on a rampage in America for those three days destroying the major cities and everyone in them!

Whatever the terrorist Christ in America was doing and in whatever timeframe, the Biblical Christ on the first day of the week, very early in the morning, had presumably returned from Paradise to take up his wounded body and interact with his disciples for the next 40 days in the Holy Land.

3Nephi 8:23 tells us “And it came to pass that it did last for the space of three days that there was no light seen; and there was great mourning and howling and weeping among all the people continually; yea, great were the groanings of the people, because of the darkness and the great destruction which had come upon them.”

This puts God/Christ in the awkward position to stop the rotation of the earth so that no light shone on the North and South American continents!

Wow! Don’t laugh, we are told in Book of Mormon, Helaman 12:14 that this is something that the Mormon Christ can do very easily. Primitive man will think the sun has stopped, but those with faith know that Christ has stopped the rotation of the earth for his own purposes This 3 days of darkness would reflect the 3 days before Christ appeared to Mary and the disciples in Jerusalem with none of the Gospel writers mentioning the fact that for darkness to cover America for 3 days, daylight would cover Palestine and Europe for the same 3 days without anyone noticing!

But, the Book of Mormon Christ is still terrorizing the people of America. What would we do without Smith to show us these details of the extent that the Mormon God will go to test man’s faith! Smith is finally revealing to the world the extent of all the miracles his terrorist Christ is willing to perform for mankind! Wow!

3Nephi 9:1 “And it came to pass that there was a voice heard among all the inhabitants of the earth, upon all the face of this land, crying:

2 Wo, wo, wo unto this people; wo unto the inhabitants of the whole earth except they shall repent; for the devil laugheth, and his angels rejoice, because of the slain of the fair sons and daughters of my people…

Here Smith tells us that this crucified Christ is now, not in Paradise with the thief, not with his disciples in the Holy Land, not sitting on the right hand of God, but here in Columbia, South America speaking in a language that was unknown to him, and mentioning the names of cities whose names he couldn’t possibly know, bragging about all the destruction he has caused. (Probably within hours of forgiving everyone in Palestine.) Only the farfetched storyteller Smith could dream up something like this! Not only did the ‘devil laugh’, Smith was quietly laughing at how gullible people are to believe this nonsense.

3 “Behold, that great city Zarahemla have I burned with fire, and the inhabitants thereof. (And destroyed all the sacred records the prophets have kept for 600 years! Helaman 7:10 described Nephi’s house with the tower near the market in Zarahemla, 3Nephi 1:2 tells us of putting his son 4Nephi in charge of the plates of brass (Jewish Old Testament) and all the sacred writings of the Nephites, presumably stored in or near the tower. This happened, according to Smith in BC1 and AD1 In vs. 13 we find 4Nephi having a conversation with the Mormon Christ in heaven who tells us that he would be coming out of Mary’s womb the following day!) All these gems of religious history would have been lost forever without Jo Smith! Wow!

4 And behold, that great city Moroni have I caused to be sunk in the depths of the sea, and the inhabitants thereof to be drowned. (At least 14 cities are mentioned by name, all unknown to Christ.)

5 And behold, that great city Moronihah (Moron i hah, hah!) have I covered with earth, and the inhabitants thereof, to hide their iniquities and their abominations from before my face…

15 “Behold, I am Jesus Christ the Son of God. I created the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are. I was with the Father from the beginning. I am in the Father, and the Father in me; and in me hath the Father glorified his name.”

Mosiah 15: 1 And now Abinadi said unto them: I would that ye should understand that God himself shall come down among the children of men, and shall redeem his people.

2 And because he dwelleth in flesh he shall be called the Son of God, and having subjected the flesh to the will of the Father, being the Father and the Son—

3 The Father, because he was conceived by the power of God; and the Son, because of the flesh; thus becoming the Father and Son—

4 And they are one God, yea, the very Eternal Father of heaven and of earth.

Mosiah 16:15 Teach them that redemption cometh through Christ the Lord, who is the very Eternal Father. Amen

So through Smith we find that the Jewish God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is ultimately the Mormon terrorist Christ.

Here Smith gives us a perfect explanation of the Triune God about 150 BC or 1829 AD, take your pick..

We must remember the Bible Christ was living for 34 years in Palestine totally cut off from anything happening anywhere else in the world including the preparations in Heaven by the terrorist angels for the American massacre as outlined in the predestined scrip that the Mormon God had followed worlds without number…

There were obviously innocent women and children burned and drowned indiscriminately by Christ and his angels of death. The Mormon terrorist Christ is here speaking from the heavens so that all could hear over thousands of miles and they are bombarded with reasons why this Christ, who had no idea what had been transpiring here for 34 years, needed to ruthlessly kill and destroy here in America. He tells them many times he would have gathered them, and all Jews, as a hen gathers her chicks, but certainly not during the lifetimes of most of them because he was busy in Palestine. It is also interesting to observe that while Christ spoke mostly Aramaic during his ministry that he immediately knew the Nephite Egyptian dialect so he could converse freely with those who would listen in America. (Are there those who believe that Christ can at will, understand, speak, and think in every dialect spoken on Earth?)

In 3Nephi 10:8 we are told of the final words of the terrorist Christ at that point in time “And now it came to pass that after the people had heard these words, behold, they began to weep and howl again because of the loss of their kindred and friends.

9 And it came to pass that thus did the three days pass away.”

We will leave it up to the reader to decide just how these two stories of two different Christ figures are reconciled. The Bible Christ arose and took up his body again with the wounds, and appeared to Mary and the disciples. There are those who call what happened a ‘resurrection’. It appears that all he did was to activate his mortal body and have it function without blood and with holes still in his feet, side and hands. How oxygen was carried to all parts of his body without blood may be a matter of faith rather than science. How he could walk with holes through his insteps without pain or limping must remain a mystery. How he would digest the food and drink he consumed during the 40 days in Palestine, is anyone’s guess. Acts 1:3.

The Mormons will tell us this was all necessary because the prophets, that only the Book of Mormon knows, spoke of this thing where thousands of dirty people had to put their fingers in all of God’s wounds so these ‘made up’ prophets wouldn’t be liars. This was at least a two week event at 8 hrs. a day.

Forty days would be a long time for those who were spared the horrific destructions directed by Christ in America, to learn what was in store for them. In 3Nephi 11:8 we finally hear how the terrorist Christ finally shows himself in South America: “8 And it came to pass, as they understood they cast their eyes up again towards heaven; and behold, they saw a Man descending out of heaven; and he was clothed in a white robe; and he came down and stood in the midst of them; and the eyes of the whole multitude were turned upon him, and they durst not open their mouths, even one to another, and wist not what it meant, for they thought it was an angel that had appeared unto them.

9 And it came to pass that he stretched forth his hand and spake unto the people, saying:

Again, Smith has to be more incredulous than the Bible. Smith has an angel of God telling Nephi 550 years before his birth that God had an ‘Only Begotten’ to send to earth (2Nephi 25:12) and his name would be Jesus Christ, the Son of God. (2Nephi 25:19) Not to make a liar out of the Bible and Paul when he tells us in Acts 11:26 “And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.” While Smith tells us it was 73 BC in South America that disciples were first called Christians. Alma 46:16 “all those who were true believers in Christ took upon them gladly the name of Christ, or Christians as they were called because of their belief in Christ who should come. “The Bible has one doubting Thomas, Smith has thousands! With the horrific destructions that the Nephite Jews endured, certainly Nephi or some prophet was arranging for an appropriate reception for the Son of God upon the South American continent. Of the millions of people, what would be a reasonable amount to gather for this event, 10,000? This was not any more just a great teacher in Palestine with 5,000 listeners, this was the Son of God destroying half of America and descending from the Heavens! Martin Luther King got bigger crowds in Washington, DC. Let us say at least 10,000 until the word got around.

3Nephi 11:15 “And it came to pass that the multitude went forth, and thrust their hands into his side, and did feel the prints of the nails in his hands and in his feet; and this they did do, going forth one by one until they had all gone forth, and did see with their eyes and did feel with their hands, and did know of a surety and did bear record, that it was he, of whom it was written by the prophets, that should come.

We have no idea what Smith had in mind as to which ‘prophets’ prophesied that the Messiah would be crucified and be raised from the dead with those wounds. However, if there were 10,000 people and if they all went forth, one by one until they all had thrust their hands…etc. What a disgraceful thing that these people with no faith needed to do. If they tried to do it in a dignified manner, say they lined up 15 feet away from Jesus and walked up with reverence and respect, each one might take 30 seconds or 120 for every hour. So Christ would have to stand 83 hours or three and a half days of nonstop thrusting into his body! If the word got out after the first day, that crowd may have increased easily to 100,000! If we made it easier on the crowd and divided it into 8hour days, 5 days a week, we would have two weeks for the thrusting of the first ten thousand. It is of course possible that if this Christ wanted to multitask he could give the Sermon on the Mount and save a lot of time. We know that the Bible Christ used either Aramaic or Hebrew that he learned while in Palestine. How do you suppose he felt speaking reformed Egyptian that he hadn’t yet learned, to a bunch of wandering Jews?

Learn more…”Fatal Flaws of the Most Correct Book on Earth” can be bought at Amazon.com

For those reading this blog with no prior understanding, we are talking about the ‘Book of Mormon’ which claims to be a compilation of many books with different titles within that 500 plus page book, i.e. Book of Mosiah, book of 1 Nephi, 2 Nephi, 3 Nephi, Alma, etc, etc. The main story line claims to be about the Jewish ancestors of the Amerindian living on the North and South American continents contained within these books, who migrated from Jerusalem to Chile, South America about 600 BC. The book of Ether became the insertion by Smith of a history of what in Smith’s day was referred to as the ‘Mound Builders’ who preceded the Native American Indian civilizations including the Mayan, Aztec, Olmec and Inca civilizations. This ‘history’ is what Mitt Romney’s faith is based on and considers ‘scripture’ more correct than the Bible, he is currently a High Priest of that faith.

Smith and Cowdery, in their early twenties were not dumb and had fanciful storytelling abilities. It is not clear what Smith originally had in mind when he first thought up the possibility of two or three stories of two or three different groups of people back in the book of Mosiah. There was the second sketchy account of a voyage of Jews from Jerusalem with an unknown (made up) son of Jerusalem’s King Zedekiah (that Smith called Mulek), who also sailed from Palestine to South America and lived apart from the Nephites in the area of present day Columbia and grew, unbeknownst to the Nephites, into a great nation…but that is a different discussion.

Back to the Mound Builders, Smith brings up the discovery of this ‘Mound Builder’ civilization in the form of 24 gold plates in chapter 8 of Mosiah written in this unknown ‘Adamic’ tongue. At one point Smith was going to have Mormon translate this record and presumably include it in the book of Mosiah. Smith decides to have king Mosiah become a Seer and translator and has him translate this unknown (Adamic tongue) into reformed Egyptian at about 92 BC with seer stones just like Smith claimed to do over 2000 years later. (Mosiah 28:11) Whether Smith forgot this ‘Jaredite’ record was already translated by a Seer Mosiah or not, he had Moroni, who was not identified as a Seer and without the seer stones, translate these 24 gold plates again in his book of Ether with copious personal remarks, the origins if which we find in the King James New Testament.

It is remarkable that Smith, at his age, did as well as he did keeping the story, with all these records covering over 3,000 years in at least three unrelated languages, as believable as he did. It is just that the mind of the average person gets tired of following it all. The only thing consistent about the ‘writers’, is that someone needed to know the whole convoluted story, and that someone was Smith. But, with the loss of the book of Lehi by Smith’s first scribe containing the first 475 years, it presented real logistical problems for Smith and required all of his creative thinking to address this dilemma. (maybe with some help from Cowdery)

(As President, I wonder how many returned Mormon Missionaries Mitt will have as part of his government? As a Mormon, he believes in the ‘last days’ the American Constitution will be saved by the Mormon Priesthood.)

Smith fails to create a credible scenario for the winding up scene. He does have a couple of ‘flash backs’ in his final chapters of the book of Moroni when he realized he had established no Father/Son relationship between Mormon and his newly found son Moroni, discovered in 385 AD. The story by Moroni saying his father was slain in battle is patently false. (Mormon 8:5) This chapter 8 of his father’s small book is written 15 years after Mormon’s description of the last battle in chapter 7, where only he and his son and 22 others survived. Smith has Mormon say in Mormon 6:6 that Mormon had hid up all the records except the few plates that he was going to give his son, Moroni, before the last big battle. This is where the story, logistically, bogs down. Mormon could conceivably have made a record of the things he had observed on a few plates as he was commanded to do in Mormon 1:4 and might have wanted to hand those few plates to his son before the battle, but the abridgment of the whole Nephite record, supposedly done by Mormon, required Mormon to have all the tons of records at his disposal with plenty of time to study, in order to find the 1% that Mormon felt was worthy to include in his abridgment.

The only time and way this could possibly happen would be if there had been an Aladdin like cave in the Hill Cumorah that opened and closed based on Faith. (both Smith and Cowdery described one with an ever burning light that contained tons of records that even Brigham Young characterized as being many wagon loads of records, here Mormon would feel safe from his hated enemy the Lamanites, to peruse and find time and a place to mine ore in order to make dozens of fresh gold plates to engrave his abridgment on. The wicked Lamanites, without faith, could never find or open the cave to get the gold! (Naturally, the Mormon God had to move these sacred records back to hill Shim in So. America to keep Smith’s followers faith strong.)

The purported abridgment by Mormon of the tons of Nephite record plates could only have happened after the big battle where Mormon himself hid in this Aladdin cave with all the records. His son and the 23 others deserted him until Smith had Moroni return 15 years later to find the completed abridgment his father had made during those 15 years. (In a true story, old Mormon could have used his son’s help in mining for ore and procuring food while his father studied and abridged the tons of records) But Smith has Moroni following the savage Lamanites while they massacred the remaining white Jews over thousands of miles back to Columbia. When he returned again to Palmyra, New York he of course had to find the 24 gold plate Jaredite record as well when Smith wanted it translated again, instead of using the Mosiah version. He could have looked among the plates for Mosiah’s translation, but since Smith at that point, was going to turn Moroni into an angel, Smith thought making him a Seer first while still in this life was a good twist. It just made God look very impractical and not cost effective. Where the two seer stones ended up in that large pile of gold, the reader will never know or care. (An angel brought these magic stones to Smith and we presume an angel dropped them off on King Mosiah’s balcony when he did the first translation as described in Mosiah 28:12. The description is the same as Smith said he used until he found that his ‘peep’ stone in his hat was more convenient.) Again, this is all stuff that Mitt Romney considers the word of his God! Or terrorist Christ!

Smith thought the insertion of the small book, ‘Words of Mormon’ into the record right after the replacement record and before the book of Mosiah would clarify and not make him or his God look like they were inept. Unfortunately, the dating is wrong and Mormon could not possibly have made the abridgment of the book of Lehi down to the reign of king Benjamin before the big battle! He goes on to say, at this point, that he, Mormon was still perusing the records and lo and behold he just magically lays his hands on what will be Smith’s ‘replacement record’ (hurray, hurray!) that ‘All Seeing’ God had Nephi start about 950 years earlier, but was never mentioned by any of the record keepers after it was finished, even though Amaleki was to deliver it to king Benjamin, the official keeper of the records. (WOM vs. 9) Smith forgot to modify his already completed drafts of the book of Mosiah to cover this important change of events and the new character, Amaleki, the last prophet and writer of the replacement story, who Smith let live to be about 300. (Smith needed about 8-10 more father-to-son writers in his replacement record to keep age and dating more in line. The same problem occurs again with Smith in the book called 4 Nephi.)

Smith/God wasn’t thinking clearly when he had Moroni return to hill Cumorah 15 years after the last battle and say that his father had been slain in battle, and then insert the WOM indicating Mormon was in the big cave with all the records waiting for his son while in the middle of his abridgment. Mormon certainly had a long wait for his son. (15 years to 400 AD!)

Find more in “Fatal Flaws of the Most Correct Book on Earth” Book of Mormon at Amazon.com

Probably the most glaring error of Smith’s fantasy (Book of Mormon/The Most Correct Book on Earth) is in his hysterical (historical) dating. Joseph Smith trusted his first scribe, Martin Harris with his first hand written draft of the first 475 years of his thousand years of Nephite (Jewish?) history (Fantasy) in South America. This draft was stolen by Martin’s wife and never recovered. Smith had a warning from his God that the thieves were waiting for Smith to publish a re-translation of those 475 years. God told Smith that with the magic peep stone he could give a word-for-word retranslation but the thieves would somehow alter his handwritten manuscript without a trace and this would show glaring inconsistencies proving him a false prophet. These 475 years of history were part of what Smith called the Book of Lehi. Lehi was the supposed leader of a group of Jews who God led from Jerusalem to So. America in 600 BC. Nephi says they departed during the reign of Zedekiah who didn’t take the throne until a few years later. This was Smith’s first major error. (1Nephi 1:4)

Smith couldn’t give a word-for-word retranslation because of his many ad-libs so he decided that he would have Lehi’s son Nephi write a similar history of the same period for as long as he lived with Nephi’s perspective of the same events and then have this new record handed down, not through Nephi’s bloodline, but through his brother’s bloodline until he got to the timeline in the story that Smith had retained with his notes.

It is a tangled web we weave when we first attempt to deceive. Smith had a nimble. creative mind and like a lot of con artists are good until their spoken word is written down and checked for inconsistencies. The Book of Mormon is a long tedious book with many twists and turns. One is never sure of who kept the records (assuming it was true) or where and how it got to the next writer to be an actual history.

Needless to say, Harris was finished as scribe. Smith was lucky for most of his short life and it just so happened that a school teacher named Oliver Cowdery who had been boarding at Smith’s parents house, and whose father, along with Smith’s, were Rods-men together before Joseph’s father left Vermont, and was eager and willing to act as scribe and eventually as second Elder to Smith in a new Church.

(Rod’s Men were people who were paid to look for minerals or water in the ground with a witch hazel stick. Smith earned money looking for gold and silver for years with his peep stone in his hat, he used this same process, according to his wife, to ‘translate’ the Book of Mormon.) Together Smith and Cowdery, created out of thin air the first 7 books of the current Book of Mormon to replace the stolen book of Lehi. Smith got ‘revelations’ telling Cowdery that he had special gifts of the Witch Hazel stick (Divining Rod) where he would get answers from God, and also have a gift to translate other ancient records that would come later. (See original Book of Commandments corresponding to Doctrine & Covenants Sec 8)

Somehow, they had a timetable that pushed them to finish the final ‘translation’ and rushed the replacement record with a lot of quotes from the King James version of Isaiah that was supposedly written in Egyptian on plates of brass representing the Jewish Tanakh but stupidly, in Egyptian. Smith has ‘so called’ prophet/writers live two or three times longer in this replacement record than Nephi or King Mosiah to write two or three verses saying virtually nothing, but getting Smith past the 475 year timeframe. It was about May of 1929 when Smith and Cowdery got the revelation to start what is the present version of the Book of Mormon with the copyright applied for in June of that year including a description of the Jaredite history that comes at the end of the book. Obviously, Smith knew from his completed drafts before Cowdery arrived, exactly what he intended to include in his book as story line. Smith embellished and invented characters as he went along. Smith’s family told of how Joseph, as a boy, would keep his family entertained inventing Indian stories so convincingly that one thought he had lived among them.

The loss of the Book of Lehi made it necessary for Smith to re-think the ending of his Nephite ‘history’ and make up a very implausible situation that doesn’t pass the ‘smell test’ in the short ‘book’ called ‘The Words of Mormon’ dated 385 AD. He needed to have Mormon, during his abridgment, find the record that Smith and Cowdery were creating to cover the 470 years of lost manuscript and needed for it to be in the cave where Mormon could find it and insert it as part of his abridgment that would follow his ‘book of Lehi’ record that Smith had purportedly already translated. Smith needed to have Mormon, who had no schooling, be literate in both Hebrew and Egyptian, along with his son Moroni who spoke and wrote both Hebrew and Egyptian, and also managed to even translate a record written by people living about 2300 BC and who spoke and wrote in a dialect that Adam learned from God in the Garden of Eden! To think Moroni just pops up in Mormon’s record about 485 BC, literate in two major languages (Hebrew and Egyptian) is astounding, and now Smith will have him translate a record that would be a preview of everything that was to happen on earth, written as a vision in 2300 BC from Mesopotamia (Arctic Circle?) where history tells us cuneiform was used on clay tablets. But the brother of Jared was to write in still another unknown tongue all of the vision he was shown. (Ether 3:24-28) Wow! (Ether chapter 3:25 “And when the Lord had said these words, he showed unto the brother of Jared all the inhabitants of the earth which had been, and also all that would be; and he withheld them not from his sight, even unto the ends of the earth.”) The brother of Jared was then commanded to write this whole vision in an unknown tongue and seal it up with two stones and it would come forth at a later date. Smith tells us two thirds of the plates that he received were ‘sealed’ and said further that this vision written over 5,000 years earlier was now in his possession awaiting God’s wishes. Awesome! The part of the vision describing the Bubonic Plague on the people along with the Inquisition was especially gruesome! But there was nothing that God could do about it because it was all predestined and in the script he had been using for countless worlds that he has created! Mormonism!

Smith had to have Mormon bring tons of gold records at least 5,000 miles from South America to Palmyra, New York in order for Mormon to find ‘extra plates’. Smith has Mormon say in verse 3 of ‘Words of Mormon’ the following:”for after I had made an abridgment from the plates of Nephi, down to the reign of this king Benjamin, of whom Amaleki spake, I searched among the records which had been delivered into my hands, and I found these plates, which contained this small account of the prophets, from Jacob down to the reign of this king Benjamin, and also many of the words of Nephi. .” This is what Smith used as a replacement record for the lost Book of Lehi. (Which meant that God, Mormon and Nephi knew in 600 BC, would be stolen 2400 years later.) This ‘tangled web’ is getting too tangled and Smith and Cowdery are pushing too hard to get the book published so Smith is compounding his mistakes or ambiguities.

The problem is that Smith dictated as quoted above that Mormon had ‘abridged’ and extracted his 1% from the records supposedly in his hands that he refers to in this quote as a record from the ‘plates of Nephi’ down to the reign of king Benjamin. In the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon as part of the preface he tells us that what what was lost was Mormon’s abridgment of the book of Lehi from the ‘plates of Lehi’. “I would inform you that I translated, by the gift and power of God, and caused to be written, one hundred and sixteen pages, the which I took from the Book of Lehi, which was an accountabridged from the plates of Lehi, by the hand of Mormon;”

In Smith’s original version Mormon’s last words were to be chapter 7 in his book ending with ‘Amen’. However, in this version Mormon had no time to condense tons of records into a stack of plates that Moroni could carry into battle and with him following the Lamanites around for the next 15 years where somewhere his father was slain in battle as he tells us in Mormon 8:5. In Mormon 6:6 we are told he gave his son a ‘few plates’, but certainly not the rest of chapter 6 or 7. In Mormon’s life book, there is no command to write anything other than what he observed during his lifetime. He tells us in chapter 6 that he should hide the tons of records so the Lamanites would not find and destroy them, but says nothing about abridging them, only to prepare for and fight the last losing battle. It would be conceivable for him to give the first 5 chapters of his book to his son Moroni.

Smith’s head must be spinning trying to make his implausible story more plausible. We have Mormon at age 70+ sitting in a brightly lit cave in Palmyra, NY, trying to be as credible as Smith will allow him to be. According to the 1830 edition, Mormon would be abridging the whole Nephite history starting with the book of Lehi, leaving out 99% of what the prophets wrote including the words of Jesus that Jesus spoke to the Nephites. (3Nephi 26:6 “And now there cannot be written in this book even a hundredth part of the things which Jesus did truly teach unto the people; (WOM 5; 3Nephi 5:8; Helaman 3:14) Just as Smith has Nephi write his version of the book of his Father, years after the purported events. Smith had Mormon and Moroni do the same thing because in Smith’s mind, it was more credible that way. But if God was in charge of any of this, it makes him look stupid or inept at best. Why bring tons of sacred records 5,000 miles from Hill Shim to Hill Cumorah if there wasn’t going to be an abridgment?When and where would Mormon have the time to peruse thousands of plates, find ore and make an abridgment that he doesn’t say anything about in his book of his observations of his life? This effort would take multiple years of not being disturbed in a safe place where he could mine for ore. There are writers who can make fiction sound like non-fiction, but Smith is not one of them.

Smith becomes ever less credible as a ‘story teller’ and writes stuff that makes God/Christ either stupid, liars or grossly uninformed. Christ told 3Nephi that he would join Jesus in heaven when he reached the age of 72. Smith has him live to be about double that age or longer. He has the last writer of the ‘original’ records, Ammaron, that ended in 320 AD, live to be over 300 years before he buried tons of gold records all by himself without horses hundreds of miles distant from where he had been keeping them. General Mormon would then find them deep in his enemy’s territory with Mormon needing to transport tons of gold plates 500+ miles through enemy lines a total of 5,000 plus miles to New York while being pursued by an overwhelming Lamanite army bent on recovering the gold and destroying Mormon and the complete Nephite/Jewish race!

The Book of Enos 521-421 BC:

Enos is the son of Jacob, the brother of Nephi, (whose family couldn’t read or write and wanted nothing to do with being historians) he turned the record over to his son Jarom in 420BC having kept the record for 104 years and writing 27 verses. This would be one verse every four years! Jarom starts in 420BC, and writes until 361BC a total of 15 verses in 59 years; similar to the ratio of his father, a verse every 4 years. Omni takes over in 361BC and writes until 317BC, a total of 44 years, with 3 verses; one verse every 14 years! We then have Amaron who writes at least until 279BC, a full 38 years with a total of 6 verses giving us a verse almost every 7 years.

We then have two writers writing 3 verses along with the last writer for a total of 149 years and a total of 21 verses, giving us a strong feeling that these ‘prophets’ must have been doing something besides writing. For 400 years none of these writers were coordinating their writing or dating with the Nephite Kings, who were supposed to be the principal historical writers for the Nephites. With this last prolific group we have again one verse every 7 years with the last writer writing 90% of the verses.

To achieve this amount of creative writing God/Smith had these ‘prophets’ live in the 200 plus year range. Can the reader imagine how much we would have if Mormon edited out his usual 99 percent? Can we assume that the lost book of Lehi contains the 400 year King’s history that God doesn’t feel is important anymore? It is strange that Nephi, the most prolific of all of ‘small record’ writers with dozens of pages dies at the age of about 70, while Mosiah, the most righteous king and prolific writer, God has him die at 63. Why then the unrealistic ages for ‘Prophets’ who don’t write? Were the lives of God’s chosen people so shallow at that time that God felt one verse every 4 yrs. was ample? Below is the table with a clear perspective.

As an illustration of what God has to do to make this all work is to take Omni, for whom the book of Omni was named, and if the cycle of birth is maintained in an average fashion, God needed to keep Omni alive until the age of 207 just to write 3 verses of little consequence! Above, in the book of Enos, is a reasonable ‘replenish the earth’ table for the writers from Nephi until the end of the replacement record. We see our God of miracles kept *Chemish alive 221 years to write ONE verse! His son has a few more years of longevity and writes a total of TWO verses!

To illustrate the grave dating problems of the replacement record: These family members are keeping the record with dating that prophesies the coming of Christ in 600 years. The lunar-solar calendar of the Israelites requires the insertion of an extra month every three years. In the space of 100 years it will make the dating short by three years if it is not added in. Since Smith was unaware of this, his characters were as well. The ages of these writers are 2 to 5 times the age of anyone else. If they add multiple years to their own life span, how can we rely on their dating of anything else? Omni is 163 years old when he receives the record in 361BC. He writes two verses and says it is 317BC reflecting 44 years that he has counted in those 3 verses making him 207 years old. He gives the record to his 182 year old son Amaron who waits another 38 years, writes one verse and says it is now 279BC, and him now, 220 yrs. old. For the next 155 years there is no fixed dating until Mosiah 6:4; this gives a date of 124BC and is relied upon for the rest of the BOM. If they didn’t add the extra month every 3 years it would be 111BC for the Nephites and 18 years short for the birth of Christ! CAN THIS BE ANYTHING OTHER THAN JS RUSHING THRU TIME TO GET TO THE KING BENJAMIN SPOT WHERE HIS DRAFTS CONTINUED? I would rather believe there is no God than believe in this inept exalted Man as God, that JS portrays.

If Smith had a more accurate time frame for his book of Lehi that was lost, we will never know. But we can be sure that the book of Lehi, covering the same time frame, would be less than half the pages of the replacement record! We also know that in 3Nephi Smith extends the life spans again because he again doesn’t have enough father-to-son ‘passing of the plates’. According to the promises of Christ recorded in 3Nephi, this third Nephi (the son of Nephi) and also one of Christ’s 12 disciples chosen in America, was supposed to die and go to heaven at the age of 72. He was given the records by his father, who departed to parts unknown in 1 AD. We presume Nephi was at least 20 at the time he spoke with the spirit of Christ, the day before Christ is born in Bethlehem, unless the Nephite calendar is way off, and Christ was already a young lad. (If you pay attention, logic will tell you if Christ can speak to Man from heaven the day before he is born into the world, the fetus is growing without the heavenly spirit inside. So if anything happens to the fetus in the womb the ‘spirit’ for that child is saved for the next in line to give birth here on earth.) If Nephi was 20 in 1 AD he would be about 55 when chosen as a disciple and is promised his resurrection by Christ at age 72. Yet, in 4Nephi, vs 10, we find 110 years has passed either from the birth of Christ making 3Nephi at least 130 yrs old or 110 years has passed from the appearance of Christ to the Nephites making 3Nephi considerably older and either way, Christ’s promise is null and void.

3Nephi passes the record to his son Amos who could easily be over 100 at that time. Vs 21 tells us that 194 years has passed from the coming of Christ (still ambiguous) but tells us that Amos is 84 years older or about 184 years old and has died. He has passed the record on to his 150 year old son Amos2 with the 194 year time frame. Mormon, who abridged the record, if not JSmith, writes several verses telling the same type of story with passages of time dates until the death of Amos2.

This occurs in vs 47 where he dies with 305 years having passed away making him about 265. He manages to hand over tons of records to his 260 year old brother Ammaron. Ammaron keeps the tons of buried records in their villa opposite the magnificent temple where Christ gave his second Sermon on the Mount repeating almost letter perfect Matthew’s version of what he said. Waiting 20 years until he was 285 he decided he needed to bury the tons of records in an even safer place that no one had ever heard of in a small obscure hill that he or Smith will soon call Shim. He only needed, at age 285, to take tons of records three or four hundred miles and do so without horses and bury them in a manner that Mormon could easily find the ‘plates of Nephi’ located in those tons of records.

In a true story, during the days of young Mormon where Robbers had been in charge for years, and according to 4Nephi vs. 45, “three hundred years had passed away, both the people of Nephi and the Lamanites had become exceeding wicked one like unto the other”. (This was 10 years before Mormon was born.) Mormon would be totally dependent on the dating of these records, if we were talking about an actual history. We just have to ask: Who was teaching anyone to read and write both Hebrew and Egyptian and from what written record? Smith’s story gets murky again as to locations. We can be reasonably certain that with Christ’s burning of Zarahemla, the action of Christ’s visit was at the temple in Bountiful. We know that Zarahemla was rebuilt but we hear nothing of the records returning to Zarahemla where they had been kept for generations until Christ’s fire destroyed the city. It would not be practical to have Hill Shim in that area. It would appear that Ammaron met Nephi where Ammaron lived near the temple at Bountiful and then we are told in Mormon 1:6 that his father took him to the land of Zarahemla when he was 11 yrs. old.

He was 10 years late in following his orders to retrieve the plates of Nephi (possibly because no one had ever heard of a hill called Shim) and with all of the wars and battles, he wouldn’t get around to reading anything, providing he was one of those rare individuals who was home schooled and became literate when there was nothing to read. We hear nothing of his mother and he is separated from his father when he was between 10-14. He was preaching on the street corner at 15 and at 16 led a band of guerilla Nephite fighters for most of his life. Where he learned to read and write Hebrew and Egyptian to teach his son Moroni whom he never mentions until he is 75, we will never know. One would think while abridging the Book of Alma where from chapter 43 until the end of the book he records the name of the commander of the Nephite armies a total of 190 times he would mention that it is also the name of his son with only two in the record who have the name of Moroni! This covers a period of about 25 years.

Mormon then starts his abridgment of the next book called Helaman that mentions the city of Moroni or Moronihah that were named after General Moroni which comes another 16 times over the next 80 years with never a reference to the fact that Mormon has an only son with the same name! The reason for this is plain and simple, Smith is a story teller and he didn’t think of a son by that name for Mormon until after the great last battle where only 24 Nephites were left, one of which was a son named Moroni (Mormon 6:6) and was to be the next protagonist in Smith’s Nephite saga.

Excerpts from “Fatal Flaws of the Most Correct Book on Earth”, Joseph said this of his Book of Mormon. Can buy at Amazon.com. The scene takes place in Saudi Arabia in the most uninhabitable desert in the world with 250,000 sq. mi. of nothing but sand dunes.

With the Mormon God’s command through his Ouija ball, it brought Nephi to the middle of this great desert getting to Bountiful. (Oman) Further north in southern Algeria, ground temperatures have been measured as high as 163 degrees Fahrenheit!

If you could choose, as God’s ‘chosen’, would you prefer to bear and raise your children in 250,000 square miles of sand dunes for their first 10 years of life, or would you prefer to be sealed in a cigar shaped vessel being tossed right side up or down by mountain waves in a constantly gyrating container for 344 days? (Book of Mormon )

Leaving the Jews that Smith brought to South America from present day Oman on the Arabian Peninsula in 590 BC and go back in time to the people who came out of Noah’s Ark. Smith has them leaving Iraq after having lived in Babylon for a few generation, traveling by foot with all their possessions including elephants, bison, horses, goats, cattle, etc, etc for the Arctic Circle where they then built 8 barges that were submersible, and voyaged for 344 days to America sometimes on top of the water and sometimes in the middle of the ocean with mountain waves crashing on them. They had no control over when God might submerse the vessels so the small hatch for air was pretty much sealed tight. Since there were no sails and prophets have described these as cigar shaped vessels, it would be like pushing heavily laden logs across the Atlantic Ocean at a very bumpy snail’s pace.

One must keep in mind, since all of the animals that survived Noah’s flood were ALL now in Mesopotamia; Joseph Smith’s God needed to bring, along with his chosen people, horses, bison, elephants, oxen, grizzlies, wolves, anacondas, coyote, etc, etc.

All of the birds and animals indigenous to North and South America entered these 8 airless containers; not once, but twice! The first time, both animals and humans were sealed in an air tight container designed by Smith’s God, himself, for their 700 mile journey, being pushed like logs with wind guided by this same God at one mile an hour to the northern shore of the Caspian Sea. Joseph Smith’s God did not became aware of his fatal ship designing mistake when his angels opened the barge doors 2 months later and found everyone dead. No, not then!

Remember, the Mormon God is only a resurrected Man who may have been just a simple farmer who was born, lived and died on his 60 acre farm when he lived on another ‘Earth’. So this exalted Man, still learning on the job, promptly revived both mortal man and beast, including of course, the honey bees and the Grizzly bears. The fairy tale continues with them led by ‘God’ in a cloud with them on foot to the Barents Sea at the Arctic Circle. (Ether 2:6)

Rub al Khali, Saudi Arabia Lehi Land

There, this bi-polar Mormon God tested them by forcing both man and beast to live 4 years in their tents in sub freezing temperatures without further instructions from God as to what God expected them to do. Could this be the spot God had chosen, ‘where no man had been’? He gave them hope in Ether 1:42 when God said he would go before them to this promised land.

Now for 4 years in this bitter cold they have heard nothing from their God! Why? Because young Mormon Gods must increase their kingdoms and glory by having as many wives as possible in order to produce and control as many spiritual children as possible in other ‘worlds’ for Eternity! Interestingly enough, this one exalted Man (the Mormon God) has already made worlds without number, following this exact same script, making bodies of flesh with ‘evil therein’ so the Devil has plenty of company in the huge realm that he controls knowing he is a vital link in God’s PLAN. (See Book of Mormon 2Nephi 2:29 and Pearl of Great Price, Moses 1:33 ‘And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose; and by the Son I created them, which is mine Only Begotten. This contradicts Mormon doctrine that their exalted Man/God had many sons, including Lucifer. Only Begotten refers to ‘in the flesh’ which wouldn’t happen for centuries!

In vs. 13 we are told they arrived, going northward, to another seashore, that they named ‘Moriancumer’ after Mahonri Moriancumer, the brother of Jared, the great Prophet, who in 4 years would be shown hours of heavenly Videos of the Predestined Earth as it was planned by this exalted Farmer, scene by scene, from the beginning to the end. All of this vision Mahonri was to write on frozen clay tablets in confounded cuneiform language and bring it all to this ‘Promised Land’! So, between overseeing the building of these 8 new barges at the North Pole, he now had to find time in his freezing tent, after finding a suitable clay pit there at the Pole, and proceed to write the thousands of words that Joseph Smith was about to translate until his Mormon God… changed his mind.

God could show these videos because exalted Man/God had videoed his ‘worlds without number have I created’ (Moses 1:33 Pearl of Great Price) following the exact same script. Smith’s Book of Mormon tells us at least 3 times as in 1 Nephi 10:19 ‘…the course of the Lord is one eternal round’.

Mahonri had no idea of this when he arrived after a week of freezing temperatures, he expected his God in the cloud would give him a clue as to what to do with man and beast. Four years passed with multiple freezing deaths of both man and beast. None of the honey bees survived and the Oxetpecs, Ephankas, Orphanas and the Lomcure’s became extinct! (the problem could be as simple as ‘writer’s block’ for Joseph Smith.)

In Ether 2:14 we are told the Lord finally returned and instead of apologizing to Mahonri for God’s negligence, He proceeded to chastise Mahonri for not getting in touch. We are finally told that the Lord would forgive them for all their sins especially the sin of wanting to return to the warm fertile Euphrates valley after they were abandoned for 4 years by God in the Arctic Circle! But not to worry, the worst is still yet to come! But first in vs 16 ship designer God, instructs them to build again the same identical barges that they built for the Caspian Sea, (without light or air) to cross from the Polar Arctic area to western South America, continually being rolled like logs for the whole 10,000 plus miles!

God knew instinctively that the one mile an hour speed of the 700 mile Caspian Sea would not do for the 10,000 mile Atlantic journey, so he would have to create fierce winds with mountain waves. (Having never been on the ocean when he was a man on His earth, he didn’t know that this would produce violent seasickness.) Anyway, when they got to the Barents Sea and were instructed by God to build again the same identical barges (Smith was familiar with barges from the Erie Canal near his home in Palmyra, N.Y) that these stupid people, (not knowing they died in the first set of barges) started again building the same identical barges; the first, the second and not until they were all completed again, lying on the Barents seashore on blocks of ice, did this young prophet realize that God’s design was a disaster waiting to happen! In vs. 18 we find the barges all lined up on the shore of the Barents Sea on top of 10 ft thick slabs of ice; then, lo and behold, Mahonri makes an amazing discovery! The Mormon God knows nothing about ship building!

Ah, the mysteries of God! Lo and behold, is it not written in the sacred book of Mahonri’s vision, (that Smith was forbidden to translate) was it not at this point when God forgave Moriancumer, (the brother of Jared) that his mind was enlightened and he reminded this exalted Man that his earthly creation still needs air to breathe and that they needed to be able to see inside the barges for all kinds of activities for such a long journey? They needed some way to dump waste material of humans as well as animals. They needed a lot of water and provisions for themselves and the animals, especially the larger elephants, the humongous cureloms and cumoms, bison, oxen, cows, horses, wolves and of course, grizzlies were problematic. Unfortunately, the Mormon God continued to follow his script in heaven, while realities on earth were quite different!

Here a great mystery is revealed that explains, when, why and where Moriancumer moved Mount Zerin. Mt. Zerin, (Book of Mormon Ether 12:30) was of course the mountain at the southern tip of the 700 mile long Caspian Sea where God got the cedars for the cedars of Lebanon that Solomon used in building his Great Temple. These cedars first grew, after the flood, on Mt. Zerin, near Mount Ararat where the great grandfather of Mahonri, Ham, landed with his father, Noah, in the Ark. Yes, it was this very Mount Zerin where all the wood came from for the first set of barges and where all the tools were left, thinking they had done their job.

And it came to pass that God told Moriancumer that all he needed to do, if he had the faith of that proverbial grain of ‘mustard seed’, is to command that same Mount Zerin to remove itself from the Caucasus Mountain Range and appear in the Arctic, near Santa’s Workshop, now! So the identical barges (Ether 2:16) were built again and Santa could have wood for all the sleighs and toys he needed. It was all so simple!

The devil is in the details and he certainly was there during the building of both sets of 8 barges. In verse 18, Moriancumer tells us he has built the last of the 8 barges exactly like the first set precisely the way God designed and directed, i.e. without the possibility of light or air! Mahonri now perceives this as a problem! But in Fairy Tale stories, there is no problem that isn’t solvable. Rather than using logic and figuring it out by himself he felt he should run it by the vessel’s designer, the Mormon God!

Ether 2:20 gives the farmer-exalted Man’s response. ‘Behold, thou shalt make a hole in the top, and also in the bottom; and when thou shalt suffer for air thou shalt unstop the hole and receive air.’ Yea, sure! God is going to get his heavenly fan and blow directly into the hole blowing out all of the stale air replacing it with fresh. He instantly assigns an angel to this job for the whole voyage.

Since the Mormon God had already conceived of them being submerged like a submarine he continued: ‘And if it be so that the water come in upon thee, thou shalt…close the damn hole as quickly as you can! (The hole in the bottom was for the times the barge turned upside down with the mountain waves, but the same procedure needed to be followed like with the hole on top. CLOSE IT AS FAST AS YOU CAN! ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU ARE LIKE A WHALE IN THE DEPTHS OF THE OCEAN. (Book of Mormon, Ether 2:24 ‘I will bring you up again out of the depths of the sea.’ All 8 barges of you and yours! Just keep the alligators chained down and away from the sheep!

There you go, notwithstanding them being 500 or a 1,000 feet in the depths of the Ocean there was still no pressure on these holes or stoppers or on the bodies of the occupants. When the vessel flipped upside down how did the elephants and bison avoid landing right on top of the hole stopper and break it? At least the ladder to get there! Did it open out or in? How could it ever be water tight! We never hear that Mahonri did as did Noah when he put pitch on the Ark both inside and out. If you’ve ever tried to push an inflated beach ball under water you see just how far you can get. But then, what do farmers know about a ‘tight like a dish’ wooden vessel filled with air and its ability to submerge itself even a few feet and come to the surface again.

You really have to hold back a laugh when Mahonri only wants lights in a completely closed vessel so he can see to ‘steer’ not to pee. Vs. 19… More about all this nonsense in ‘Fatal Flaws’ volume III…”Fatal Flaws of the Most Correct Book on Earth” (Book of Mormon) is at Amazon.com

Joseph Smith lived his whole life in the North East of the USA never having ever seen a sand dune desert. He undoubtedly had access to a world map showing the location of the Middle East including Saudi Arabia. He identified the Red Sea and felt safe when his Ouija Ball gave Nephi directions; Smith would know it was a south-southeast direction. (1Nephi 16:13) Smith just didn’t realize that Nephi had no way of determining this type of direction because that kind of compass wasn’t invented yet!

Joseph Smith would see on his map the Sinai Desert and realize that this was the desert/wilderness area the Israelites wandered in for 40 years where the Bible says the Jewish God preserved them with manna and quail with water springing forth out of rocks on Moses’ command. What Smith didn’t know was that it was just a ‘wilderness’ with little, if any, ‘sand dunes’. However, when he determined that his destination for his hapless group would be ‘Bountiful’ on the south-east tip of Arabia and gave the command to turn eastward so the group wouldn’t end up in Sheba/Yemen; he didn’t know he was pointing them directly into the most feared desert of 250,000 square miles of nothing but sand dunes! Some of which were 800 feet high. The Bedouin call this area Rub al Khali or in English ‘Empty Quarter’. Empty quarter because both man and beast avoided it until the 20th century when oil was found.

The Empty Quarter is 583,000 square kilometers in size with no oasis or water holes!

Anyone who has studied both the Bible and Book of Mormon can see Smith’s efforts to portray similar images to a Bible believing world. According to the Bible, God’s ‘chosen’ wandered in the ‘wilderness’ for years; so why not Nephi’s group? Well, the Jewish God had a reason for this delay getting his chosen to the ‘promised land’ and at least kept his chosen healthy by providing on a daily basis manna, quail and water! And for those Bible scholars, Exodus 13:31 tells us they took their cattle and flocks with them for sacrifice and sustenance. Obviously, where they were headed was not an ‘empty quarter’ but a wilderness where animals could graze and find water.

The only way for Nephi to get to Bountiful would be by following the Red Sea, Frankincense Trail and there would be tribes of people where the capital of Yemen is and the capital of Oman. It is just like with Mormon on his way to Cumorah, he would have met all kinds of Amerindians all along the way. Sorry, apologists!

But, in Joseph Smith’s childish fantasy, the Mormon God’s ‘chosen’ are sent for years into a world of sand dunes where no animal with any instincts at all, would spend more than 2 days! There is simply no way to sustain life unless you have prepared for the journey with female camels to provide the only liquid the Bedouin will see and staked down sandstorm proof Bedouin tents (with a male camel to cary it) until he leaves this empty quarter within a few days! He better have bags of rice and dates and use the dung of the camel to boil the camel milk and to cook the rice. What would two families who lived in big walled Jerusalem all of their lives know about any of this?

Within Saudi Arabia, winds average 3.2 to 4.8 kilometers per hour (kph) and can reach 112 to 128 kph in early afternoon. Expect major sandstorms and dust storms at least once a week.

The greatest danger is getting lost in a swirling wall of sand. Wear goggles if you live in the 20th Century and cover your mouth and nose with cloth. If natural shelter is unavailable, mark your direction of travel, lie down, and sit out the storm. The temperature of the sand can easily reach 160 degrees on a hot summer day so one must seek shelter. However the temperature at night can drop to 40 degrees. One is inclined to want to get to one’s destination quickly.

Since Smith had never been to a desert area he could not describe a make-believe event in a desert area. There is never a mention of these weekly sand storms. There is never a prayer to God to get them out of this hell hole! Can you imagine Nephi looking for food or an animal to shoot with his stick in the above photo? Can you imagine what kind of health these unfortunate humans might have after a 10 year diet of only uncooked, bloody scavenger meat from a stray Hyena or Jackal, all forbidden by the Law of Moses?

Smith says nothing in his 500 plus pages of his fantasy about drinking water or camels! Smith does say in Book of Mormon, 1Nephi 16 that the Ouija Ball kept them near the borders of the Red Sea (Nephi would have no way of knowing what this body of water was called at the time. If Smith had his ‘fantasy people’ stop at the Port of Ezion-Geber, he might have found out what the sea was then called) and that the Ball led them to the ‘more fertile’ areas. Logistically, this could happen, but this was a known Bedouin travel path to Sheba and they would have to encounter Bedouin tribes at those fertile spots and barter for water, dates and sheep. (Smith’s designated ‘Bountiful’ where they spent a couple of years was the main Oasis on the famous Frankincense Trail and would have a Bedouin Tribe cultivating it and living there! Had Nephi gone a few miles north-west he would have found a port with shipbuilding to get the caravans across the Persian Gulf and on to the Orient.) Lehi remained in this first ‘fertile spot’ for weeks waiting for his sons. In a true story this oasis would also belong to a bedouin tribe. This is the last of the ‘fertile’ spots that Smith mentions because in the first verse of the next chapter he tells us from that point on, they went in an ‘eastward’ direction to Bountiful. It was only ‘Bountiful’ in comparison to a sea of sand dunes. The date palms and banana trees were all planted by the Bedouins who lived there and selling supplies to the Caravan Traders.

Looking at his map, Joseph Smith would see the range of mountains along the Red Sea leading to Yemen with a rang of the highest mountains of up to 12,000 ft and would pinpoint probably present day ‘Muscat’ in the country of Oman as his ‘Bountiful’. What Smith didn’t know was his projected ‘eastward’ took his group right into the middle of 250,000 sq mi of nothing but sand dunes! This wasn’t bad enough, Smith did the absolute absurd idea of keeping them wandering in circles for the next 8 years in THESE DUNES!

To further compound these absurdities, this Mormon God now needs to take away all the natural instincts of predatory animals who avoid this area devoid of vegetation and water. And now God needs to feed these unclean animals he has forbidden his chosen humans to eat, with manna, quail and water so Nephi can shoot at them with a stick and then eat their parasite ridden raw flesh because they had no camel dung to make fire and no camel milk to drink. There were also no rocks for Nephi to smite to produce water. There is no mention during the whole 10 years of a single sand storm that Bedouins fight several times a month where the Jewish God protects Camel’s eyes for this type of existence! Their compass only led them correctly based on their faith that it would do so. Did their faith diminish when they saw that the compass brought them continually to the same 5 Wadi or Oasis water holes over the 8 yrs? When they saw their health and the health of their children deteriorate based on just raw meat of predatory animals, didn’t anyone think to ask God WHY ALL OF THIS?

Isn’t it a form of blasphemy to portray your God as cruel, uninformed or stupid?

Does the Mormon God expect Man to suspend his God given power to reason! To get out of this dilemma by saying ‘God’s ways are not Man’s ways’ is a dangerous idea when this same God gave us a brain that allows Man to reason and draw logical conclusions.

Mormons try to overcome reason by asking the truth seeker to follow Moroni’s advise even though Moroni lied about a whole bunch of stuff, including his father’s death!

Moroni 10:4 ‘And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true’;

As long as you don’t misinterpret what is being said and you pray with a sincere heart, with real intent, you will get a burning feeling that ‘these things are NOT TRUE’!

“Fatal Flaws of the Most Correct Book on Earth” can be purchased at Amazon.com

1 I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents, therefore I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father…therefore I make a record of my proceedings in my days.

[Story timeline is 600BC according to JS. Nephi’s/JS writing timeline is anyone’s guess; 568BC according to Joseph Smith, likely, 1829.]

2 Yea, I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of theJews and the language of the Egyptians.

One comment: Josephus the Jewish Historian says in his ‘History of the Jews’ that the term ‘Jew’ was first applied to the descendants of Judah when they returned from the Babylonian captivity. This would be decades after Lehi was supposed to have left Jerusalem. This term would be unfamiliar and never used by House of Judah people in 600BC!

For Hebrew families living all their days at Jerusalem who weren’t Levite Scribes, being literate in Egyptian would be unthinkable! It would be even less thinkable that a ‘Lay’ person [Laban] would have all the sacred books of the Bible down to Jeremiah including Micah and Malachi and not just on scrolls, but everything engraved on brass [bronze] plates! Having this in the current Egyptian language would appear sacrilegious to most pious Hebrews. It appears that Laban wasn’t a Levite scribe either. How can a pious Hebrew boy say the language of his father who dwelt in/at Jerusalem all his days was Egyptian?

Was Lehi preaching in the streets of Jerusalem in Egyptian? Who did he learn it from? There was no point in Lehi or Laban knowing Egyptian, or Laban translating unobtainable copies of Hebrew scripture into Egyptian even if somehow he was literate in the language. It’s one thing to speak and understand your mother tongue, which most people did, but to be literate in two tongues was the domain of Scribes.

It didn’t happen unless you were one of them. It was a ‘craft’ that Levites dominated and they didn’t just teach ‘anybody’ to read and write languages. The only reason for ‘Egyptian’ was that JS needed the record in an unknown tongue so no one could challenge his translation! If the speculation of Hugh Nibley would be correct and that Lehi was a merchant who traded with Egypt, he might speak rudimentary Egyptian but to read and write something like the Hebrew scriptures in Egyptian would need special schooling for Lehi and family as well as Laban, Ishmael and their families, and it wasn’t available to anyone but a very small group of Levite Scribes.

If Lehi didn’t live at Jerusalem all his days but lived in Elephantine, Egypt with his family, and he found a ‘literate’ Egyptian-Jew, he could be literate in Hebrew and Egyptian, but that’s a different story than what JS tells.

3 And I know that the record which I make is true; and I make it with mine own hand; and I make it according to my knowledge.

How can Nephi say he knows the record is true when he is barely into the third verse? He wrote less than 100 words! Nephi probably writes about 30-40 years later relying on his memory and his father’s record if we can believe Joseph Smith.

4 For it came to pass in the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, King of Judah, (my father, Lehi, having dwelt at Jerusalem in all his days); and in that same year there came many prophets, prophesying unto the people that they must repent, or the great city Jerusalem must be destroyed.

*2Kings 24:14 says: ‘…none remained, save the poorest sort of the people of the land.’ This is the state of Jerusalem immediately prior to Zedekiah being placed on the throne by the Babylon King in 597BC. The only true prophet in Jerusalem to declare God’s word was Jeremiah. All people of substance were taken captive to Babylon in 598BC, including Ezekiel. Jerusalem was sacked and little was left for Lehi or anyone else to preach repentance to. Bad timing for Joseph Smith! If prophets came immediately after the surrender and sacking of Jerusalem in 598BC saying ‘the people must repent, or the great city of Jerusalem must be destroyed’; the poor people who remained would wonder what cave these prophets lived in and who inspired them! Jeremiah’s prophesy was fulfilled and God led all the ‘good figs’ to Babylon. See Jeremiah 24:5 ‘Thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel; Like these good figs, so will I acknowledge them that are carried away captive of Judah, whom I have sent out of this place into the land of the Chaldeans for their good’. [598BC, just before Zedekiah.]

Jeremiah says in vs. 8: ‘And as the evil figs, which cannot be eaten, they are so evil; surely thus saith the LORD, so will I give Zedekiah the King of Judah, and his princes, and the residue of Jerusalem, that remain in this land, [Lehi & family] and them that dwell in the land of Egypt:

9 And I will deliver them to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth for their hurt, to be a reproach and a proverb, a taunt and a curse, in all places whither I shall drive them.’

10 ‘And I will send the sword, the famine, and the pestilence, among them, till they be consumed from off the land that I gave unto them and to their fathers.’

[The Nephites, if they existed, were certainly consumed off the land and removed for ‘their hurt’!]

A case is to be made that part of the ‘evil figs’ not taken captive to Babylon, were Lehi and family who were driven to a distant ‘kingdom of the earth’ for their ‘hurt’, where they became a reproach, a taunt and a curse! (This was Lehi’s oldest sons’ fate, the Amerindians! Helaman 8:22 ‘Our father Lehi was driven out of Jerusalem’

Nephi obviously never lived in Jerusalem before or during the first year of the reign of Zedekiah or he wouldn’t say what he just said about ‘many prophets’. He wouldn’t say his father lived all his days in Jerusalem but his language was Egyptian. That would be the first oxymormon. (The Bible does say ‘many false prophets’ came to Zedekiah.) It’s unfortunate for JS that he picked the worst possible time for his story, departing from Jerusalem at that time. Jerusalem had just been ‘sacked’ by the King of Babylon and 10,832 captives were taken into Exile.

When Nebuchadnezzar put Zedekiah on the throne, 2Kings 24:14 says: ‘And he [King of Babylon] carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valor, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths: none remained, save the poorest sort of the people of the land.’

This is the contradictory environment in which JS starts his story; with wealthy Laban who can ‘command fifty’ with his servants where he is in his treasury working on an OT translation on nonexistent brass. We have wealthy Lehi with his country estate and treasures! Ishmael, with his available family is not deported. Lehi’s sons could have been considered ‘mighty men of valor’ or ‘apt of war’. Vs. 16 further defines ‘…and smiths a thousand, all that were strong and apt for war, even them the King of Babylon brought captive to Babylon.’ (598BC) The next vs. says it was then that the Babylon King put Zedekiah on the throne!

The Jewish Historian, Flavius Josephus tells it this way in his ‘Antiquities of the Jews’, pg 307: “…for the King of Babylon…gave orders to his generals to take all that were in the city captives, both the youth and the handicraftsmen, and bring them bound to him; their number was ten thousand eight hundred and thirty-two; as also [King] Jehoiachin, and his mother and friends…and appoint Jehoiachin’s uncle, Zedekiah, to be king.’

If we back up to page 306 we have a prelude of what happened three or four months before Zedekiah was made King that the BOM story totally ignores.

‘…he [The Babylonian King] did not observe the covenants he had made, but he slew such as were in the flower of their age, [Not Nephi or Ishmael’s daughters.] and such as were of the greatest dignity, [Not Laban or Lehi!] together with their King Jehoiakim, whom he commanded to be thrown before the walls, without any burial; and made his son Jehoiachin King of the country, and of the city: he also took theprincipal persons in dignity for captives, [Not Lehi, Laban or Ishmael] three thousand in number, and led them to Babylon; among which was the prophet Ezekiel, who was then but young.’

This was 3-4 months before Zedekiah was placed on the throne. Jehoiachin reigned only 3 months before he was replaced by Zedekiah. So here we find that three to four months before Zedekiah was placed on the throne the King of Babylon killed ‘such as were in the flower of their age’. This couldn’t affect Nephi or Sam or the daughters of Ishmael! Sure! The ‘principal persons in dignity for captives’ wouldn’t be Lehi, Laban or Ishmael! Why didn’t Nephi find this important enough to mention if his brothers and sisters weren’t killed in ‘the flower of their age’? How did they escape this first deportation of 3,000 and the second of 10,832, four months later?

Josephus continues in Chapter VII: ‘But a terror seized on the King of Babylon, who had given the kingdom to Jehoiachin, and that immediately; he was afraid that he [Jehoiachin] should bear him a grudge, because of his killing his father, and thereupon should make the country revolt from him; wherefore he sent an army, and besieged Jehoiachin in Jerusalem; but because he [Jehoiachin] was of a gentle and just disposition, he did not desire to see the city endangered on his account, but he took his mother and kindred, and delivered them to the commanders sent by the King of Babylon, and accepted of their oaths, that neither should they suffer any harm nor the city; which agreement they did not observe…for the King of Babylon did not keep it, but gave orders to his generals to take all that were in the city captives, both the youth and the handicraftsmen, and bring them bound to him; their number was ten thousand eight hundred and thirty-two and appointed Zedekiah as king.’

Joseph Smith should know it’s perilous to write history if you have never studied history! To give a fuller picture of Jerusalem, another quote from 2Kings 24:11 ‘And Nebuchadnezzar King of Babylon came against the city, and his servants did besiege it…And he carried out thence all the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the king’s house, and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold which Solomon King of Israel had made in the temple of the LORD, as the LORD had said.’

What about the treasures from Laban’s house, or those from Lehi’s house? Do you think they would be spared? Next to silver, bronze was the most precious and useful metal from which swords and shields and artifacts are made. There was no ‘brass’ during this period. So ‘brass plates’ is a misnomer. The modern Bibles translate the term ‘brass’ to the correct ‘bronze’. The ‘treasures of the house of the LORD would include the 12 bronze oxen and the ‘sea’ that they supported. Next to gold and silver, bronze was on the Babylonian King’s list for removal. If the soldiers are ransacking and looting the city for the second time just before Zedekiah is placed on the throne, do you think they didn’t go to the district where the wealthy lived and ransacked those houses? The Bible says all the persons of dignity (wealthy) were deported! Can we believe that Laban’s villa next to the High Priest’s villa, along with Lehi’s two villas are all untouched? They took all the bronze from the temple but left Laban’s stacks of bronze plates intact in his Treasury? Sure!

Our smart Mormon God who was once a ‘Man’ and is learning on the job has inspired Laban from youth to become literate in Hebrew. He did this by inspiring a Levite Scribe to break the rules and teach someone not of his tribe to read and write Hebrew. God picked this scribe in 620BC because this particular scribe was also literate in Egyptian when King Josiah was paying tribute to Pharaoh Necho of Egypt. It was Necho who put Jehoiakim on the throne that Nebuchadnezzar threw from the city walls; (according to 2Kings) but was carried to Babylon in fetters (according to 2Chronicles) in the 1st sacking of Jerusalem. It was just 6 mos. and two kings before Zedekiah started to reign in 597BC after this second sacking; it left only the poorest people of the land. In all of this upheaval and turmoil, Laban was constrained by the ‘spirit’ to scratch on the hard brass surface, plate after plate of sacred Hebrew text into Egyptian that God’s special angel was wafting from the temple before it was sacked; scroll after scroll from the sanctuary where they were placed by the High Priest. The Mormon God was doing this year after year counting on the diligence of Laban to accomplish this important task so that the soon to be called prophet Lehi could take them with him to America. But, God is busy multi-tasking and let Lehi depart without the ‘bronze’ plates and it took God a couple of weeks and 200 miles on foot by Lehi and family, before God remembered the purpose of working with Laban on a daily basis for the past 30 years.

This is the environment where Lehi was preaching repentance and warning about a future destruction to Jerusalem! When they took the prophet Ezekiel captive, why not Lehi? Why doesn’t Lehi/Nephi tell us how they escaped all of this, two months before they left for the Red Sea? For Joseph Smith, the big event was Lehi’s dream which paralleled the dream of his own father recited many times to the family.

7 AICTPT he returned to his [our] own house at Jerusalem; and he cast himself upon his bed, being overcome with the Spirit and the things which he had seen. [Like all the Elders that were taken captive?]

Nephi just happened to come home after his archery lesson so he was able to see this. Nephi himself was amazed how his mind could recall these details after 30 or more years! JS probably thought by using the term ‘at Jerusalem’ it gave him more flexibility, not fully realizing that Jerusalem was a ‘walled city’. You either lived ‘in’ Jerusalem or you didn’t.

Vs 7 must be chalked up to another error on the part of JS, unless Lehi was really a wealthy merchant. Having a ‘house at Jerusalem’ and one in his ‘inheritance’ land of the half tribe of Manasseh would mean he had to cross through the lands of one or two tribes before he was at his ‘country estate’ with all the gold, silver and treasures. It’s extremely difficult to believe that Lehi and family along with Laban and Ishmael and their families all survived as though the history the Bible and Josephus speak of, never existed! If Lehi had a house that wasn’t protected by the wall of Jerusalem, his was one of the first to fall to the invading Babylonian army along with his gold and silver and precious things! The house of Ishmael was next with his 5 daughters killed, being in ‘the flower of their age’ or captive and headed for Babylon. (Events occurring 1-3 months before Zedekiah became King of Judah!) JS’s story couldn’t occur without reconciling the historical events in Judea, that we hear absolutely nothing about!

Fatal Flaws of The Most Correct Book on Earth (Book of Mormon) can be purchased at Amazon.com

Everyone is born with vocal chords, a diaphragm, a set of lungs and resonance cavities, so everyone is capable of making operatic sounds. However, if one is not musical and able to portray the words as the composer intended, there is not much chance for a career. You may be a fast learner, and that helps. If you are coordinated like an athlete, that also helps. The next of the ingredients is being highly diciplined and willing to make sacrifices of time and energy. It is a myth that once the voice is ‘placed’ you no longer have to sing out anymore, only at performances. It is like telling a fighter that once he has a good left jab and a knockout punch he no longer has to train and only has to show up for the fights.

If you want to sing well in a long career, you must be willing to keep in training, and that means ‘singing out’. Jan Pierce said when asked how he could sing so well at 65 (I heard him in Europe in the Masked Ball) he replied. I sing an opera every day, either at home or on the stage. Caruso said: ‘If I do not practice one day, I know it; if I do not practice two days, my friends know it; if I don’t practice 3 days, the audience knows it!

Today, with videos of opera everywhere the myth that an opera singer needs to be fat is laid to rest. The fact is, you need energy to sing. Athletes have energy and they recover fast. The best way to have the reserves and stamina you need to sing opera is to train as an athlete. And assuming you have a healthy technic you will sing beautifully for years, or as long as you keep in shape.

If your vocal muscles have not been trained it will take a few months to produce operatic sounds that will be appropriate for singing in that Art form. I am looking for young musical people who have the passion to sing along with the musicality but lack the operatic sound. That can be built!

A couple of scholarships are available to the right dedicated people.

Preference is given to those capable of becoming dramatic tenors. The size and shape of your chords and resonance will determine that.

There is no way on God’s green earth that anyone can make logical sense of who wrote what and when to produce the Book of Mormon other than it all came from the head of Smith between 1827 and 1830.

If we start with the book attributed to Mormon, (3rd from last in B. of M.) all Mormon was commanded to write on the plates of Nephi were the things he observed during his lifetime. (Mormon 1:3) If this was all that Mormon was to do, he certainly didn’t need to take the unabridged writings of 900 years that, according to some, could weigh hundreds of pounds and jeopardize these gold records in his tent while fighting wars for 60 years over thousands of miles of real estate? A God that would want him to do this would not be very smart or practical. We have to conclude that Ammaron/God didn’t intend for Mormon to take the complete plates of Nephi record at that time, in fact we have to take Mormon’s word that he was just to take the ‘plates of Nephi’. (Mormon 1:4) Smith tells us the lost first 475 years of the book of Lehi were written on the plates of Lehi. Maybe Mormon should take just a few empty plates that Ammaron generously included for the next engraver of the record?

When you put all the loose pieces together with Cowdery’s statement of the amount of records in the ‘cave’ at Cumorah, where Mormon was supposed to have buried the tons of records that Brigham Young said would represent several ‘wagon loads’, we have to conclude these were the very same records that 300 year old Ammaron buried in hill Shim in South America for Mormon to find. First, to take what Brigham says were several wagon loads, without wagons, this 300 yr. old man would be hard pressed to get it there without finding a neat Aladdin like cave like the one found at Cumorah. The next problem would be to put name tags on each individual stack so Mormon could discern from all of the look alike plates which ones were the plates of Nephi. This is also assuming that Mormon was ever taught by his father to read and write.

But, if Mormon didn’t take some plates with engraved Egyptian how was he to learn to read and write the language? Where was he going to learn Hebrew so he could teach his son, that he doesn’t mention until he is 75 yrs. old, and be able to tell us that the whole history could have been written in Hebrew, if the plates had only been large enough! (Mormon 9:33) But the Mormon God, who isn’t Jewish, had his reasons for Nephi to make smaller plates and keep the Egyptian writing that the Jews hate,d but, of course, the last thing that Smith would want is have his gold plates written in a Hebrew dialect.

The book is a maze of contradictions and absurdities and one doesn’t know which to point out first. To think that the God of the Universe had anything to do with it would be blasphemy. There is critical dating everywhere you look. The departure date of Lehi and his group from Jerusalem in 600 BC during the reign of Zedekiah could not happen if Zedekiah didn’t ascend the throne until late 597 BC.

It was more than just ‘convenient’ for Lehi with 4 sons plus Zoram, a male servant of Laban, for God/Smith to come up with a family with 5 unmarried daughters to join the trek into Saudi Arabia with no animals and few provisions. If we count Nephi’s two sisters who didn’t marry, there were initially 16 people sharing Lehi’s tent. 1Nephi 16:6-7 tells us that the four sons of Lehi plus Zoram married the 5 daughters of Ishmael. With the crowded tent we would have to believe Lehi’s wife was already pregnant with Jacob when the journey began. Nephi and his brothers had tents when they returned to Jerusalem for the plates of Laban but when Nephi killed Laban and stole the hundreds of pounds of plates, while being chased by Laban’s servants, they were forced to leave their tents behind.

The ultimate first destination that God would have known was Muscat, Oman. The traditional Frankincense Trail would have taken less than 2 months with Camels. By following the guide (Ouija ball that worked like the Ouija board based on the faith of the participants) that the Mormon God furnished, they spent 8 years traveling in circles in what the Arabs called ‘the Empty Quarter’ 250,000 sq. mi of nothing but sand dunes. According to the story the women were giving birth with Lehi’s 45 year old Wife giving birth to her second son in that environment with no fruits, vegetables, milk or anything other than uncooked predator mea,t that was forbidden under the Law of Moses. Why they didn’t all die of scurvy or malnutrition can only happen in a bad fantasy novel. After 8 years of this bodily abuse, they faced an 18,000 mile sea voyage of at least 2 years with the same nourishment problems. By the time they reached the middle of Chile, South America, (according to Smith), their health longevity was greatly impaired.

However, if Nephi who says he was ‘exceedingly’ young in 600 BC was 15 then his soon to be born brother Jacob would be 16 years younger. The book of Jacob, vs. 1, tells us that it is now 545 BC with Nephi now 70 and about to anoint a king to rule over an extended family of maybe 10 adults with children. In order not to marry his niece, Jacob needed Zoram to have a couple of daughters, one for him and one for his brother Joseph. We know of no children from Nephi other than two girls who may have died on the ship voyage. In Jacob 1:9 we are told that Nephi anointed a MAN to be King over this small family group.

If Nephi had a son and anointed him, Jacob would have indicated that. If Jacob had a son besides Amos, and he was anointed, he would have said that. 2Nephi 5:6 tells of the split in the original group and who followed Nephi. It tells us Nephi’s older brother Sam with his family and Zoram and his family with no indication if there were sons. It appears Jacob and Joseph were still unmarried and waiting for one of Zoram’s daughters to be old enough. The probable date for this is maybe 570 BC with Lehi having passed away maybe a year or two earlier. The most probable of all the candidates would have been the Son of Sam that uncle Jacob should have honored by saying so! Unless, when Jacob mentioned the various clans in Jacob 1:13, he left out Sam and family because they had all died. The clan of Sam disappears and is never mentioned again in the Book of Mormon. Probably because in 2Nephi 4:11 Lehi wanted Sam to be part of Nephi’s clan. But that is still no reason not to identify a son of Sam as the newly anointed king if that was indeed the case.

We hear of no sons from either Zoram or Joseph but if it had been Joseph’s very young son, we would think Jacob would indicate the MAN/boy was an immediate family member rather than anointing the son of the servant Zoram. Unfortunately, there was no one else! Jacob was 45 at the time, and if Enos, Jacob’s son was 22, it was possible for an even younger son of Jacob, to be king, but not without giving him a name and standing in the family. If Enos was 22 in 545 BC the book of Enos vs. 25 tells us 179 years had passed, which would make it 420 BC and make Enos the healthiest of the Nephites living well past 100. The son of Enos, Jarom, writes in vs. 13 that now 238 years had passed making it 361 BC and if he was born in 535 BC when Enos was 32, Enos’ son Jarom, would now be 174 yrs. old!

“Wherefore, the people were desirous to retain in remembrance his [Nephi’s] name. And whoso should reign in his stead were called by the people, second Nephi, third Nephi, and so forth, according to the reigns of the kings; and thus they were called by the people, let them be of whatever name they would.”

12 And it came to pass that Nephi died.

This is not supposed to be an abridgment from Mormon or anyone else and should be the exact words that Jacob writes. Of course, no one could write this in 644 BC at the time of Nephi’s death. We know this whole story is a series of ‘flashbacks’ or someone like Mormon writing at the end of his life quoting what he may have remembered 50 years earlier. To give Jacob the benefit of the doubt let us say he knew about this reign of kings named Nephi because he waited another 23 years to write it, just a few months before he dies. And manages to put all the 3,800 words of the false prophet Zenos and the stupid story of Sherem in chapter 7 about an unknown man who wasn’t a Lamanite, but knew the traditions of the Jews; however, he somehow spoke the Egyptian dialect that Jacob and his group of maybe 10 adults spoke. Of all the unbelievable characters in the book, this probably takes the cake.

Jacob mentions a second king in vs. 15, so this young unknown first king, not related to the principal characters, did not last long. Jacob 2:1 tells us of a speech that Jacob gave after the death of Nephi where he warns his brother Joseph and any grandson that Zoram might have had about polygamy and that they shouldn’t do it. He talked about the ‘wives’ of Nephi’s ‘people’ that could have been at most 2 couples that Jacob united in marriage in a temple that he and his brothers made as a replica of Solomon’s temple while everyone lived in tents. (2Nephi 5:16)

But we are first told that God spoke to Jacob to get to the temple immediately to warn them about acquiring riches because somehow these two couples were looking for gold and silver rather than planting crops and tending the flocks, as though they could buy something with it at Walmart rather than barter with each other for something useful. One of these grandmothers must have been a seamstress that had brought over a sowing machine and some angel brought down some beautiful cloth from heaven and they were making ‘costly apparel’ where the wife could sit in the café and sip coffee. Come on Jo, you can do better than this! You were lousy with dates, but these people were barely starting out in a new land and half or more of them still living in tents. Who ever learned to spin wool? Where were all the sheep?

Jacob 4:1 tells us of the difficulty of engraving words on plates but not the difficulty of finding and mining the ore to make the plates. Nevertheless, his next chapter is a complete quote from a false prophet named Zenos that he would have to have seen on the stolen brass plates. These were the plates that Jacob would have to have at the temple where these extraordinary young people came to study the scriptures and learn about David and Solomon’s polygamy, of course after someone had taught them to read and write Egyptian. Maybe at most, one or two lucky ones could take time from providing food and shelter and attend 4 hour a day classes held by Jacob who learned Egyptian from of course, Egyptian speaking angels. Nephi had no time with so much metal plate making and engraving he had to do. He had to find time to engrave on metal plates the writings of his father that had to have been done on parchment. He tells us in 1Nephi 1:17 that he is going to make an abridgment of his father’s record before he gets around to the story of his own life. His father died in Chile maybe about 573 BC after which Nephi was warned by God that his older brothers were planning to kill him and Nephi should leave with all of the important Egyptian writing so his older brothers would continue their Hebrew language and ways, without any written word. It is unclear who among the Egyptian speaking Nephites kept the Hebrew language still viable both spoken and written for 1,000 years. (Mormon 9:33) Someone must have dropped the ball because they could not understand the Hebrew speaking Mulekite/Jews when the Nephites joined with them in their land maybe about 180 BC. (Omni vs17)

Smith was way off base having Jacob ‘engrave’ almost 4,000 words (Jacob 4:1 ‘and I cannot write but a little of my words, because of the difficulty of engraving our words upon plates’) of the most off the wall, repetitious, plagiarism of Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 11, where Paul spoke to the ‘wild olive tree’, (gentiles in Rome) it had relevance, but to this tiny family of so called Jews, it was ridiculous.

Anyone studying the Book of Mormon as ‘inspired’ actual history has a most difficult job trying to get the sequence of things with any reliable dating. The dating has significance for a variety of reasons not the least of which was the prophecy that Christ would be born exactly 600 years from when they left Jerusalem.

To repeat myself, we have to realize that major changes were made in the first 475 years of the history of the book that Smith was trying to palm off on the unsuspecting world. The lost manuscript for this period of time was referred to by Smith and his God as the Book of Lehi from the plates of Lehi. Lehi was the father of Nephi who, along with the help of Smith gave the beginning account of the same 475 years that Nephi/Smith is trying to cover. These years and story line have to dovetail into what was contained in Smith’s drafts for the rest of the 1,000 years. Smith knew that at any moment those who stole his manuscript to discredit him would produce it if the two story lines differed in any meaningful way. The first 20-30 years coming from the son’s perspective, didn’t have to be a word for word match of his father’s lost record.

For today’s readers who see current events recorded for TV, must understand that every bit of hard news of what claims to be history will be written after the events and often many years later. Such is the case starting with Nephi, whether a fictional character or not. In his first chapter, he certainly is not writing while in Jerusalem or at any time on the Asian continent. His father may have written on parchment scrolls in his house in Jerusalem, or tent in Arabia (we don’t know how he got the scrolls or ink) Smith was smart enough not to have him write on gold plates from some Solomon gold mine.

It is already most difficult for any serious scholar to believe the Laban ‘brass plates’ story. First of all, Smith should have used the term ‘bronze’ as brass didn’t exist in Jerusalem at the time. Laban, a non Levite, and not from the Scribe profession is totally unlikely to even be able to read and write Hebrew let alone Egyptian. The claim that Lehi preached to the tribe of Judah calling them to repentance in Egyptian is equally preposterous. How would Lehi become a bi-lingual literate man who home schooled his youngest son to be the same without being a Levite Scribe?

Reading, writing and keeping the religious record was the domain of the Levites whose inheritance was the Priesthood. The other tribes were farmers and/or those who tended flocks, made garments and had shops, etc. They were not literate people. Even Jeremiah, a Priest, the current prophet in 600 BC had his scribe write down his words. Baruch, Jeremiah’s scribe would have been the only one to mention king Zedekiah in this time frame and was the keeper of Jeremiah’s oracles. It is most unlikely that Baruch would be meeting with Laban, a non Levite, so he could translate and transfer Jeremiah’s prophesies to the brass plates in Egyptian!

If we compare Smith’s history with history from Historians we find during Lehi’s 30’s and 40’s that there was considerable turmoil. In 609 King Josiah sided against King Neco of Egypt and was killed. The Egyptian king eventually put a son of the killed Josiah on the throne and called him Jehoiakim. He was hostile to Jeremiah and kept him in prison for much of his reign.

“On one occasion, when an early draft of the prophet’s writings was being read to Jehoiakim (Jer 36:21), the king used a scribe’s knife to cut the scroll apart, three or four columns at a time, and threw it piece by piece into the firepot in his winter apartment. At the Lord’s command, however, Jeremiah simply dictated his prophecies to Baruch a second time, adding ‘many similar words’ to them.” (That is what true prophets do, take note, Smith.)

We are told by this same Historian that Jehoiakim stayed on the throne through the 605 BC sacking of Jerusalem by the king of Babylon. It included deportation and training of Daniel and his three companions for important work in the king’s palace in Babylon. (Dan 1:2-6)

The historian Josephus gives a graphic description of still another sacking of Jerusalem and what kinds of people were deported to Babylon.

“Yet when he [King of Babylon] came into the city [Jerusalem] he did not observe the covenants he had made, but he slew such as were in the flower of their age, and such as were of the greatest dignity, together with their king Jehoiakim, whom he commanded to be thrown from the walls, without any burial; and made his son Jehoiachin king of the country and he took the principal persons in dignity for captives, three thousand in number, and led them away to Babylon; among which was the prophet Ezekiel, who was but young.”

Where were Lehi and his sons while this was going on? Jehoiachin was put on the throne for 3 months in 597 BC. Smith/Nephi tells us that they left Jerusalem in 600 BC, that would be 600 years before the coming of Christ. We get no clue whatever from Nephi that Zedekiah was the uncle of the short reigning king Jehoiachin, and whose name had been changed from Mattaniah to Zedekiah. These accounts are given in Chronicles and Kings but from the historian Josephus in the Antiquities of the Jews the following account of the third sacking of Jerusalem that Lehi and family would have to live through but fail to mention. The king of Babylon was afraid that Jehoiachin might hold a grudge against him for throwing his father to his death, didn’t keep his agreement once again.

“Which agreement they did not observe for a single year, for the king of Babylon did not keep it, but gave orders to his generals to take all that were in the city captives, both the youth and the handicraftsmen, and bring them bound to him; their number was ten thousand eight hundred and thirty-two; as also Jehoiachin, and his mother and friends. And when these were brought to him, he kept them in custody, and appointed Jehoiachin’s uncle, Zedekiah, to be king.”

If Zedekiah was not put on the throne until the end of 597 BC, it is likely Nephi and his group didn’t leave before 596 BC, if it was during the reign of Zedekiah. (It is absolutely amazing that Nephi’s family escaped death or deportation during all three sackings without breathing a word to his readers! And of course Lehi is on the streets warning them of things that already happened. And if we can believe 2Kings 24:14 “And he carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valour, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths: none remained save the poorest sort of the people of the land”) Then Zedekiah was put on the throne! Vs. 17 says “all those apt for war, even them the king of Babylon brought captive to Babylon.” Lehi’s sons couldn’t possibly fall into any of these categories, at least not in Smith’s fantasy story.

If 596 BC is the correct date, according to world historians, then the coming of Christ 600 years after the departure of Lehi from Jerusalem couldn’t be before 4 AD at the earliest. If we take into account the Jewish lunar calendar that did not have 365 days and was 11 days shorter than the solar, a month was needed to be added every 3 years to make it solar and keep the spring festival in the Spring. If Smith and the Nephite prophets didn’t understand that, we would have 600, divided by 3, divided by 12 to get an additional 16 years to reconcile Christ’s birth for the Nephites. So the Mormon Christ comes about 20 years after the Bible Christ and of course we know that the Bible Christ spent the three days after his crucifixion in Paradise with the thief. (Luke 23:43 it is interesting that Smith in his ‘inspired’ version of the Bible inserts along with many other things, this verse in his Matthew gospel) Peter infers in 1Peter 3:19 that Christ may have been preaching to those in prison who were wicked in the days of Noah. The Mormon Christ spent this time with his terrorist angels destroying an exceeding number of cities in North and South America, along with innocent men, women and children.

So the maze or smoke and mirrors created by Smith is too great for one to come to any rational idea about dates and how historical data was possible that is in line with world historical facts.

Nephi tells us that his Jewish father who lived his whole life in Jerusalem wrote his whole history and translated his Hebrew dreams, visions and revelations into Egyptian to make his Nephite record, or did he write half and half depending on what one is trying to prove. He and a relative, Laban, who his son murdered to steal Laban’s life’s work, were the only ones besides scribes who could do this.

Nephi 1:16 says,

“And now I, Nephi, do not make a full account of the things which my father hath written, for he hath written many things which he saw in visions and in dreams; and he also hath written many things which he prophesied and spake unto his children, of which I shall not make a full account.

17 But I shall make an account of my proceedings in my days. Behold, I make an abridgment of the record of my father, upon plates which I have made with mine own hands; wherefore, after I have abridged the record of my father then will I make an account of mine own life.

Verse 17 tells us he is going to make an abridgment of the record of his father, and after he has done that he will start on the record that we are presently reading. This he cannot do until he gets the revelation to make such a record and has the time and ore and plates to do so. To complete his father’s record, he would have to wait until his father was dead and finished his writings which wouldn’t be until Nephi had left Chile for Peru, South America, if you can believe Smith. (The Mormon apologists will say this all happened in Central America.)

Nephi 19:1 tells us Nephi made plates of ore after their arrival in Chile. (According to Smith)

“…the Lord commanded me, wherefore I did make plates of ore that I might engraven upon them the record of my people. And upon the plates which I made I did engraven the record of my father, and also our journeyings in the wilderness, and the prophecies of my father; and also many of mine own prophecies have I engraven upon them.”

He doesn’t say here that the record of his father was an abridgment. To be logical, he would want to transfer all of the writings of his father from parchment to plates after his father’s death and after he had escaped from his brother’s plans to kill him. This would put a big burden on his brothers and Zoram in building the Solomon-like temple, tending the flocks and planting seeds that they hopefully harvested while still in Chile. This may have been another reason for his brothers to be angry that Nephi took all the written records as well. He wasn’t the next in line to rule the family after the death of their father.

Lehi probably died in Chile about 571 BC so they were all united in one big clan for close to 20 years. Certainly Lehi’s last blessings and prophesies found in 2Nephi chapters 1-4 would be part of the plates of Lehi. We are not told who was transcribing Lehi’s words as they were spoken. We are not told if the daughters of Ishmael and Nephi’s older brothers were all bi-lingual or if Lehi spoke to all in Egyptian or Hebrew. Later in the story we learn that the Lamanites didn’t understand Egyptian, only a Hebrew dialect.

We are also told, contrary to modern science, as Lehi’s clan journeyed in Chile

“… in the wilderness, that there were beasts in the forests of every kind, both the cow and the ox, and the ass and the horse, and the goat and the wild goat, and all manner of wild animals, which were for the use of men.”

It is too bad that Smith didn’t think to include sheep so one could believe that they eventually wore something besides animal skins. Smith uses the term ‘sheep’ as a metaphor dozens of times and is mentioned once in the Jaredite record as being brought to America in 2200 BC along with the Elephants but it seems no Elephants or sheep greeted Lehi. In 18 years they certainly domesticated these animals for the use of the clan. The writings of Lehi would be a treasure for all the sons of Lehi especially those next in line to rule the clan. When Lehi ‘waxed old’ before he died it fell to Laman to take charge of what the clan possessed. If Nephi was going to make a hard copy of what his father wrote on parchment, this would be the time to do it. He needed to find ore, mine it, refine it and make plates. Laman would look at this as a ‘clan’ effort to preserve their father’s heritage. Nephi would have to be excused from other clan duties to do this tedious work.

When Nephi fled from the clan’s farm with all who went with him, he took not only all the clan’s plates he had made, but the brass plates of Laban that would weigh a couple hundred pounds if it contained the whole Old Testament including Jeremiah. One would think he would take at least a pack horse for the tents and all of the plates. We are told when they got to the land of Nephi that they planted seeds that they stole from Laman, but left the animals because there were plenty of those same animals in Peru that were found in Chile. These animals then magically died out without a trace. (They were brought to America in 2,200 BC by the Jaredites and lived here for at least 2,200 years and then God had them all disappear to test the faith of the Mormons.) With Nephi absconding with all the clan’s treasures it is amazing that Laman and Lemuel and the sons of Ishmael did not follow on their fastest horses to get it all back and finish killing Nephi.

2Nephi 5:7 says: “…And after we had journeyed for the space of many days we did pitch our tents.8 And my people would that we should call the name of the place Nephi; wherefore, we did call it Nephi.”

Smith was not aware of the vast distances in South America. To travel 1,000 miles certainly took the ‘space of many days’ The action took place here until about 170 BC when the Nephites who followed Mosiah joined the Mulekites in Columbia, in the city of Zarahemla.

Here comes more smoke and mirrors again for in verse 4 we find that Nephi already says he did make another record of events far into the future from his arrival date in Chile in 589 BC.

Wherefore, I, Nephi, did make a record upon the other plates, which gives an account, or which gives a greater account of the wars and contentions and destructions of my people. And this have I done, and commanded my people what they should do after I was gone; and that these plates should be handed down from one generation to another, or from one prophet to another, until further commandments of the Lord.

“Fatal Flaws of the Most Correct Book on Earth” (Book of Mormon) can be bought at Amazon.com